gelatinous resources and naming things with their hashes

MediaWiki(MW) installations such as WikiPedia, and perhaps most Content
Management Systems, serve jellylike documents. By this I mean that while
they offer a "permanent link" claimed to be a URL to a "specific version",
that parmalink value doesn't  change when the served html changes because
something changes in the chain of document construction calls ("Templates"
in MW) .  This seems to make the permalink a less than wonderful URI
especially for the object of such things as oa:hasScope, or in general for
other predicates that implicitly, or explicitly, require that one or
another URI refers to an immutable resource.

I only recently became aware of IETF 6920, "Hash-based URIs" and don't
recall that it, or anything like it, has surfaced in this list.  6920 gives
a standardized way to name text resources by their hash values.  Of course,
if hash values are of use in provenance, scope, or other OA concerns, a
community could decide for itself how to exploit them,  but to an extent,
IETF 6920 already offers such a way.....

Comments?

p.s.  I usually whine about URIs with any semantics whatsover, so I'm not
sure whether I'd argue against 6920 on these grounds.  And yet....
p.p.s.  In fact has 6920 taken off anywhere at all?

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920 is an IETF Proposed Standard for
hash-based URIs.


Bob Morris

-- 
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390


Filtered Push Project
Harvard University Herbaria
Harvard University

email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
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