Re: Resolution != Naming (was RE: FPIs to URNs)

At 8:12 AM 12/6/96, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>At 05:20 AM 12/6/96 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>>I think that any document that is published on the Web should have system
>>IDs for all entities. That could be in an SGML Open Catalog if we make SOCAT
>>handling a mandatory default resolution mechanism, or inline, if we do not.
>>Lee is right to complain that there must be a URL somewhere, or else we are
>>just handwaving.
  I also agree with this. It's best to have a name and a location than one
only of each...

>What about for data content notations?  As many notations don't have
>publicly accessible definition documents (which is what the external
>identifier of a notation is supposed to refer to first and foremost), it's
>seems unreasonable to require URLs for them.  (If this issue's already been
>discussed, let me know--I haven't had time to go back and read all the
>traffic since SGML '96.)

   We've been discussing entities, levaing NOTATION to the side for the
moment. On NOTATION, I think we need to be careful -- Wherever possible, we
should use MIME-types in harmony with the rest of the net -- whether we
also want to support FPIs on the same optional basis as we should for
documents is an open question. Their real use, it seems to me, would be for
private types, and since we have the x- mime types (though their use is
discouraged officially, I think) we may not even need them for that.

   For notation, I don't know that we need FPIs because that SYTEM ID (if a
MIME type) is already globally-unique and persistent, with a well-defined
naming authority: IANA.

   I think it would be a compatibility issue, more than anything. My
impression is that public notations are not very common, but I could be
wrong.

   -- David

I am not a number. I am an undefined character.
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Friday, 6 December 1996 10:57:43 UTC