[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XPointer crisis
From: "David G. Durand" <david@d...> > I am writing to urge immediate action related to Xpointer, if you > care about it. > > Xpointer seems to be under imminent threat of being gutted. There > appears to be a significant chance that there will be no XPointer at > all, or only a drastically cut down one. Particularly endangered are > the ability to have ranges of any kind, or any forms of addressing > other than "bare names" or maybe child sequence locations. Good. XPointer with ranges deserves to die. The last I saw of the gutting proposals, ranges were being kept, so gutting it will do nothing to improve its acceptability. The wrong bit is being removed. Almost everyone who says "I have implemented part of XPointer" seems to then say "except for ranges" because, compared to most of XPointer, ranges sit unhappily on the other side of an enormous architectural gap which should form the natural boundary for separate specs. The gap is "can I retrieve a WF object which is the subject of the link?" The WWW has succeeded not because URIs give us the ability to abstractly identify any resource (which is not a bad thing) but because the resources could be downloaded. The bits before the ":" are the key to the success of URLs, not the bits after. The "semantic web" is a nice, but things like ranges should only come after the practical foundation of the "pragmatic web" based on retrievable resources. In fact, it seems that URIs have succeeded either when they do have a locatable entity, or when they are their own resource (such as a uuid). When they are just symbols for things that have no entity or response from dereferencing them, they don't seem to have thrived yet. Now ranges may be a way to allow improvement in that, but the Linking WG should complete the outhouse first before installing a gold toilet seat. Cheers Rick Jelliffe Small is Beautiful. E.F.Schumaker
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