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Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs

• To: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 12:56:25 -0800
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <E16al5H-0004sH-00@m...> <3C69A32B.6D1AA8C9@p...> <E16awvc-0002PK-00@c...> <001801c1b48a$61177ba0$0301a8c0@n...> <3C6AC7FF.1010809@r...>

John Cowan wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> Fair enough.  But one and the same URI should not name two different
> things. 

Agreed. The question is whether *you* can have a URI which, when someone
does a GET on it, returns an HTML page. I don't see why not. We can
agree that there can be an RDDL document at a namespace URI without the
HTML document *being* the namespace. It is one representation for the
namespace. Another might be a pure HTML rendition, another a schema etc.
conneg allows this possibility to be concrete, not abstract.

>...
> Again, fair enough.  But the use of "description" is an equivoque: the
> HTML you can GET from http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/ is a representation
> of a certain resource of type "hyperdocument". 

That is not true. 

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=foo+bar

The thing you get back is an HTML rendition of the set of all documents
with foo and bar in them indexed by Google. If Google supports conneg, I
can ask for an XML rendition too. The "resource" is neither of type HTML
nor hyperdocument nor XML. It isn't even IMPLEMENTED that way. It is
implemented as a set of probably non-contiguous bits in a Big Honking
Database.

The only question is whether Google wants to reify the HTML page
*itself* (as another URI) so that statements can be made about it rather
than about the abstract resource. Or maybe the person making the
statement wants to make the distinction that they aren't talking about
the resource but the representation of it.

 Paul Prescod

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract"URIs
    • From: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@n...>
  • Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

• References:
  • Re: Re: Why REST? (RE: WSIO- With Name)
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
  • "Abstract" URIs
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Re: "Abstract" URIs
    • From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>
  • URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@a...>
  • Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

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