comments on draft-eastlake-cturi-01.txt

I'm taking the liberty of copying this discussion to "uri@w3.org".

A group of us were working on creating a general mechanism
for writing URIs that identified protocol elements that were
registered by IANA. The idea was to support, in a general way,
the policy in some quarters of using URIs as the unique identifiers
for various protocol elements, rather than having a centralized
registry. To allow protocols that used URIs to also reference
IANA-registered data, we were working on developing a general
"iana" URN name space, where "urn:iana:<registry>:<value>" would
make reference to the IANA value.

However, for the case of content-types (which was the original
motivator), Don Eastlake wrote a draft 
    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-eastlake-cturi-01.txt.

I think draft-eastlake-cturi does a much more complete job
of injecting content-type definitions into URI space than we
were contemplating; there's more complexity, but I think the
complexity is necessary for the application.

I'm concerned about having a "contenttype" URL scheme, and
might rather see urn:iana:content-type:... where Don would
have written "contenttype:", just to avoid proliferation of
schemes which are merely used for this kind of embedding.
Now, perhaps "urn" itself isn't the right scheme.

I don't think section 3 belongs in the document; it isn't
about registering a URI scheme for naming content-types, but
about some other kind of hint about processing.

Larry

Received on Thursday, 18 January 2001 14:04:15 UTC