Henry S. Thompson
W3C
University of Edinburgh
Markup Systems
23 September 2009
- JAR and HST have kept up an on-again-off-again conversation about our
underlying unease regarding the official story about naming on the Web:
authority, access, ownership, etc.
- Since I didn't get a new draft of Dirk and Nadia finished, I thought I'd
try to
share our thinking with you, see if together we can shed some more light into
these dark corners.
- Jonathan is definitely not responsible for this presentation
- But he does deserve credit for most of the good ideas herein
- Two problems
- Which may not at first appear related
- The RFC 3986/AWWW story about URI denotation isn't quite convincing;
http:
URIs actually are vulnerable, at
least in principle, at least in the long term
- Nearly two years ago Jonathan and I had a long walk and talk one evening,
in which he tried to explain to me his concerns about what AWWW had to say
about URIs as names.
- He tried to explain a use case or usage scenario that motivated his concern.
- I probably misunderstood it, at least in detail, but it's worth
relaying none-the-less
- It's helped me see some things, and I think it can help the rest
of us
- JAR was trying to put together a sales pitch to the Life Sciences community
- For the use of URIs as official names for objects/classes of concern
to that community
- With a story about authority (who says what names mean)
- And about persistence
- That he could stand behind
- And the AWWW story didn't satisfy him
- That is, he didn't think it would satisfy his constituency
- For what he took to be good reasons
- He contrasted the URI story with an existing story, namely
Linnean taxonomic nomenclature for plant and animal species and genera.
- Michael Sperberg-McQueen recently made a similar point, with respect
to his work with the scholarly editions community
- Does the owner of
www.w3.org
really
determine the meaning of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
?