Re: FRBR WEMI and identifiers

From: Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen_at_nyob>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:56:31 +1100
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 02:37, Ross Singer <rossfsinger_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> For the record, I am not agreeing with Alexander:  the fragment should
> never be considered by the server and has nothing to do with conneg --

Your understanding of the fragment identifier is deeply flawed, I'm
afraid. Of *course* the fragment should be considered by the server;
that's the point. The server then decides what to do with the extra
identifier, and in the case of HTML it does nothing different, but in
the case of XML and RDF (and friends) they are *different* resources.

A quick start;
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier

> I was just pointing out that a very major http agent (or, more
> correctly, the library that many http clients are based on) behaves
> incorrectly here.

No, I'm afraid *you* do. :)

> What I'm saying is "don't assume your server will never see fragments".

You should be saying, "assume your server always see fragments."

> It's an aside to the otherwise valid counter argument Jonathan makes
> to Alexander.

It's worse than that. From that very same page ;

"In RDF vocabularies, such as RDFS, OWL, or SKOS, fragment identifiers
are used to identify resources in the same XML Namespace, but are not
necessarily corresponding to a specific part of a document. For
example http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#broader identifies the
concept "broader" in SKOS Core vocabulary, but it does not refer to a
specific part of the resource identified by
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core, a complete RDF file in which
semantics of this specific concept is declared, along with other
concepts in the same vocabulary."

This is an explanation of a big misconception of how the fragments are
meant to work. The only reason for this confusion (I suspect) is that
with HTML-based content-types (which taught us all how "the web
works") the servers don't react to it (creating the illusion that
fragments "do nothing on the server side").


Regards,

Alex
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Thu Nov 12 2009 - 16:58:01 EST