Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 25

Particular encodings and content are then accepted by or considered valid by the
syntax and semantics of a language respectively (and thus the normative importance
of standardization on the Web in determining these criteria). Also, we do not restrict
our use of the word 'language' to primarily linguistic forms, but use the term
'language' for anything where there is a systematic relationship between syntax
and (even an informal) semantics. For example HTML is a language for mapping
a set of textual tags to renderings of bits on a screen in a web browser. One
principle used in the study of languages, attributed to Frege, is the principle of
compositionality ,where the content of a sentence is related systematically to terms
in which it is composed . Indeed, while the debate is still out if human languages
are truly compositional (Dowty 2007), computer languages almost always are
compositional. In English, the content of the sentence such as 'Tim has a plane
ticket to Paris so he should go to the airport!' can then be composed from the
more elementary content of the sub-statements, such as 'Tim has a plane ticket'
which in turn has its content impacted by words such as 'Tim' and 'ticket.' The
argument about whether sentences, words, or clauses are the minimal building
block of content is beyond our scope. Do note one result of the distinction between
encoding and content is that sentences that are accepted by the syntax (encoding) of
a language, such as Chomsky's famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” may
have no obvious interpretation (to content) outside of the pragmatics of Chomsky's
particular exposition (1957).

2.2.3 Uniform Resource Identifiers

The World Wide Web is defined by the AWWW as “an information space in
which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global
identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)” (Jacobs and Walsh 2004).
This naming scheme, not any particular language like HTML, is the primary
identifying characteristic of the Web. URIs arose from a need to organize the
“many protocols and systems for document search and retrieval” that were in use
on the Internet, especially considering that “many more protocols or refinements
of existing protocols are to be expected in a field whose expansion is explo-
sive” (Berners-Lee 1994a). Despite the “plethora of protocols and data formats,”
if any system was “to achieve global search and readership of documents across
differing computing platforms,” gateways that can “allow global access” should
“remain possible” (Berners-Lee 1994a). The obvious answer was to consider all
data on the Internet to be a single space of names with global scope.
URIs accomplish their universality over protocols by moving all the information
used by the protocol within the name itself . The information needed to identify any
protocol-specific information is all specified in the name itself: the name of the
protocol, the port used by the protocol, any queries the protocol is responding to, and
the hierarchical structure used by the protocol. The Web is then first and foremost
a naming initiative “to encode the names and addresses of objects on the Internet”