Re: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

> roy: the worst thing with relative URIs is that at any time, there is only 
> one base. If you have stuff from 2 naming trees at the same time, you're in 
> trouble.

On the contrary, I can have a hundred different bases for which a given
relative URI can be resolved, just as we can have a hundred different
repositories for standard MIME types.  Since I only use the relative
parts within the protocol syntax (unless it is a non-standard extension),
it really doesn't matter to me what the base is, provided that I pick one
(or allow the user to configure one) that points to at least one existing
namespace that is managed by the IETF.  "text/plain" is a relative URI.
For this type of identifier, I simply don't allow relative names outside
of those within the standard namespace, and I pick the base according to
an algorithm that is different from web page retrieval.

Personally, though, I don't see any reason to standardize all IANA field
values as some sort of URI or another.  A media type is simply an identifier
within a given context, and the Content-Type field name is more than
sufficient to establish that context.

....Roy