Re: The "info" URI Scheme - Uri crisis again ! [There is no crisi s]

On 2003-10-01 19:26, "ext Hammond, Tony (ELSLON)" <T.Hammond@elsevier.com>
wrote:

> 
>> And we are in the midst of uri crisis again !
> 
> This whole thread reminds me of Scott McNealy's position vis-a viz privacy
> on the Net: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it!"
> 
> The same thing with URI dereferenceability: URIs do not have to be
> dereferenceable: Get over it!

True. Technically. But if *no* URIs were dereferencable, then
the Web would not exist.

And, to disagree with Scott McNealy, while there might not be
absolute privacy, there *are* levels/degrees of privacy, and
the inability to achieve absolute privacy does not invalidate
efforts working towards as much privacy as is possible, reasonable,
optimal, cost effective, etc.

> The "info" scheme merely seeks to identify information assets from public
> namespaces so that applications can refer to these assets in a highly
> standard (read "uniform") manner using URIs. Sure could be neat to add in
> the hooks for some extra dereference functionality. But that's well beyond
> the scope of the "info" URI scheme. All we are concerned with is
> representing these information assets within the URI naming architecture -
> nothing more.

But with *less* effort (because you can leverage the existing infrastructure
for managing domain names) you can accomplish everything central to the
info URI scheme's goals while also providing those hooks.

> So, the suggestions to basically a) misuse HTTP (which despite everything
> still holds out the retrieval promise of GET, etc - it is after all a
> HyperText /Transfer/ Protocol), and

I've not seen any suggestions that could be considered misuse of HTTP,
rather, what I myself have proposed is *precisely* what HTTP is for.

> b)to deploy a DNS domain name for use by
> third-party namespace authorities (a DNS domain over which they have no
> admin control) are both untenable positions - as far as the "info" URI
> scheme is concerned.

The maintainers of the info URI scheme will maintain a web server
to provide information about the various registrants, so you
already are dependent on the DNS infrastructure.

Whether you employ subdomains to distribute the management of
the registered namespaces, or maintain a single mother-of-all server,
is a separate issue. I.e.

   http://registrant.some.root.domain/...

or

   http://some.root.domain/registrant/...

Either way, you're going to need to have a reliable, persistently
named server to manage the registrants.

> I see no crisis.

Nor do I. For that matter.

Patrick

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 02:44:19 UTC