RE: [xml-dev] URIs harmful (was RE: [xml-dev] Article: Keeping pa ce with James Clark)

Poetry my beeeeehind.  Put it in an address box and test it. 
It's not that "access is at true test of identity": it is 
that without a test, identity is a worthless value.  There 
is no identity apart from observation.  Identity is assigned.

The funny thing here is that the technologists are the ones 
hiding behind an abstraction that fails in practice and are 
calling their attempts at poetry a specification.

It is ALWAYS dereferenceable.  Always.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Brown [mailto:]

I get the impression, from Len's poetry and Simon's calling my ideas a pile of
nothing, that some are of the opinion that 'retrieval' *is* implicit in a URL
to the extent that you can't even look at a URL without trying to access the
resource at the other end, and they think this access is somehow supposed to
be the true test of a resource's identity. I do not agree at all, though I do
think that exactly how a URL is a subclass of a URI could stand to be
clarified.