Brian Smith wrote:
James M Snell wrote:
Brian Smith wrote:
In other words, categories are (supposed to be) uniquely
identified by @term, not by (@scheme, @term). So, terms must
be globally unique to be unambiguous and so they SHOULD (IMO)
be IRIs already.
There was never any intent to make categories globally
unique; nor is there any justification to requiring them to
be so.
I didn't say that categories were required to be unique. I said that if you want to uniquely identify a category, it has to have a unique term. If you are happy with them being ambiguous, then uniqueness isn't necessary.
The scheme attribute tells the processor how to
interpret the value of term[...]
The specification does not say anything about how to interpret terms, only that
categories are identified by terms.
[...] which can be any string value, including an IRI.
[I had to manually indent your mail]
I know any string value can be used (even the empty string). But I still
recommend that people use IRIs as for the term attribute to avoid any confusion.
Why? By your logic an IRI would just be a string here.
I can see why you might think that the authors of the
specification intended to write the opposite of what they
wrote. But, I doubt that all the people that have reviewed
the specification overlooked such an obvious contradiction.
It is better to assume that the specification says what it means.
Regardless, It is prudent to apply the robustness principle here:
when creating categories, ensure the category is uniquely identified
by the term attribute (interpret the specification as it is written),
That's not what the spec says. What spec text allows a client to assume
a term is globally unique?
and when accepting categories from others, copy them unmodified (if
the producer doesn't take the spec literally, you should also tolerate
that as much as possible). If you do that, you are unlikely to run into
any problems.
I can't reconcile your wish that terms are globally unique to the spec
text, which does not say that. But categories have similar problems to
XML namespaces and I like that you're asking the hard questions.
Bill
