Re: [dxwg] A short token to specify a profile may be used as long as there is a discoverable mapping from it to the profile's identifying URI [ID5] (5.5) (#290)

The problem with the logic is here "So those systems have to be changed to look up the non-URI as URI?"
No - if systems already use tokens and understand them they dont need the URI - the lookup method allows better self-documentation and new clients to discover what tokens mean (something they cant do very well at the moment - it usually means discovering and reading human readable documentation - both non automatable).

I dont think we are disputing it is going to be preferable to use only URIs moving forward.  At the moment however all the implementers proposing to test this need to handle the token case.  Unfortunately the bush in the road is the existing Web, and every service out there that allows alternative representations to be provided for a given non-information resource.  To offer a solution that doesnt support tokens we'd need to find at least two new implementers who are ready to go  deploying systems that have stable URIs for profiles. I'm happy to retrofit to support URIs (as well) - but all my data uses links with tokens (and i can adapt to the QSA model for list-profiles) and I'm unwilling to create unreadable URLs with nested encoded URIs  while I'm easing my community into the whole idea of deferenceable URIs.


clients that do already know tokens (or URIs) dont have to be changed - what this specification offers is a canonical means of finding what profiles a server supports - so the "change" is an optional retrofit of better metadata - and the burden of describing tokens already in use is trivial - it just requires a server to map to URIs. Systems that are starting from scratch can use URIs without the added option of tokens.  Minimal impact for maximum applicability.

The burden (the straight road we are forcing) is to mint stable URIs and provide a mechanism to tell people what they mean.  Tokens are just a trivial annotation on that - and my view is that if we do not ease existing practices into URIs by allowing them to document existing APIs the barrier of minting URIs before you start becomes too high.  (and this is from the perspective of someone employed to help a standards organisation mint URIs - its a seriously non-trivial task unless you think you have the one uber standard the world is going to use for all things and never need to specialise.)








-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by rob-metalinkage
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/290#issuecomment-526388380 using your GitHub account

Received on Thursday, 29 August 2019 22:40:39 UTC