RE: URIs & Namespaces

> so by visiting http://magicmail.org/, how do i know what's 
> going on? do they let me read the spec? in the end, if i want 
> to send email, i must know smtp or have a program that knows 
> how to do it, and then i use the email address that's 
> appended to http://magicmail.org/ for composing an smtp 
> message. nothing in http://magicmail.org/ itself lets me do 
> that (apart from the fact they let me read the spec), and in 
> fact, it is even harder to understand what's going on because 
> it actually is a different communications mechanism, smtp, 
> hiding behind some http facade. 

You are really taking us way off the path.  You brought it up email as a
tangent to using http for location, and now you are shooting holes in it;
you are using it as a strawman.  If we are going to use http for email we'd
discuss all the issues and work through them as there are certainly issues
to work through.   

Let's instead focus on your use case, location.

> if magicmail.org is hijacked 
> by some spam king and the good guys move on to magicmail.net, 
> all my previous stuff breaks. 

Just to make this point, magicmail.org would be backed by a foundation.  As
long as this is useful to enough companies out there so they don't want to
see it go away, there would be funding for it.  That's how such things work
as I'm sure you know.

> i am still unconvinced that binding resource semantics to a 
> domain name 
> and tunnel that through http is a good thing. not if you 
> think that the 
> semantics should be explicit and universally usable.

I think we have a prerequisite to discuss, and that is the distinction
between wgs84 coordinates and your hypothetical user assigned place names.
Can we discuss them seperately as I believe they should be orthogonal?
Without seperating them we are confusing too many issues and arguments that
make sense for one don't make sense for the other, and vice versa.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org

Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2007 23:24:15 UTC