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Re: Comparable considered necessary

• To: Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Comparable considered necessary
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 22:13:30 -0400
• References: <8BD7226E07DDFF49AF5EF4030ACE0B7E06621F0F@r...>

Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> 
> You miss the point. An identifier is not a location.
> 
> I could quite easily come up with two schemas, one with a target 
> namespace of http://www.25hoursaday.com that describes myself as a 
> GA Tech alumni and http://WWW.25hoursaday.COM which describes my 
> CD collection. Now there is no question that both of these URLs 
> refer to the same location on the web yet  neither is there any 
> question that they identify different things.

Actually, those can be treated as different HTTP (1.1) locations:

 * http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.23

Web metadata will work much better if we consistently work towards a
situation where every "logical" resource has one and only one un-encoded
URI. In other words, we should work towards a world where our software
reflects the Web's model better than it does today. The "Host" header is
a good step in that direction. Namespaces taking a hard-line about
syntactic equivalence is also.

But this strikes me as more of a theoretical issue than one we run into
in real systems. People naturally reduce the number of names a resource
has because they don't want to mess up even the small amount of metadata
we have available today. For instance if you type in the wrong name for
a resource Google won't give you back a cache for it. And your page rank
could drop if Google doesn't know to merge multiple references to the
same resource.
-- 
"When I walk on the floor for the final execution, I'll wear a denim 
suit. I'll walk in there like Willie Nelson, John Wayne, Will Smith 
-- Men in Black -- James Brown. Maybe do a Michael Jackson moonwalk."
Congressman James Traficant.

• References:
  • RE: Comparable considered necessary
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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