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URI indigestion

• To: "Xml-Dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: URI indigestion
• From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>
• Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 19:34:16 +0200
• Importance: Normal

I've just whizzed through recent posts on the various URI threads, and apart
from complaints of the issue leading to an abundance of hot air in the XML
community there doesn't seem to be a great deal of evidence of this really
being a problem. Simon did list 3 tangible interop problems, which I'll
summarise as:

1. developers don't grok URIs so they ignore them
2. developers build upon their own interpretation of URIs (which doesn't
interop)
3. developers put something strange like a schema at the end of the URL/URI

Surely both 1 & 2 are caused by misinterpretation of the specs, not by
anything being fundamentally wrong (machine-wise) with treating URL-syntax
strings as URIs. 3 may add to confusion, but isn't such a danger in itself -
there's plenty of other strange stuff on the web.

Is it really that confusing to consider "http://stuff" as a string?
Where is the conceptual leap from :

print 2 + 2
versus
print "2 + 2"

to

Address:[http://stuff]
versus
xmlns="http://stuff"

?

Within the past week the point that the namespace rec (and I think by
implication one or two others) isn't clear was made, a simple problem
solvable with "A namespace name is a string that has the syntax of a URI
reference.".

What other outstanding problems are there? Oh, the hot air. Well at least
that's helped clarify a few related points...

Anything else?

Cheers,
Danny.

---
Danny Ayers
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff>

Idea maps for the Semantic Web
http://www.isacat.net/ideagraph

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