Re: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft

Michael Mealling wrote:

>   Either the web architecture is URI scheme agnostic or it isn't. If
> the TAG is coming up with architecture that is scheme dependent then
> IMNSHO, its broken.

Various flavors of URIs have varying characteristics, including whether 
or not they are readily dereferenced.  Is it not in-scope for the TAG to 
say that "for this particular application of URIs, a form that is 
readily dereferenced should be used"?

>   And, dammit, URNs are dereferencable 

I do not know about any URN dereferencing software on any of the 
computers I use at home or at work; this is quite a lot of computers of 
many different flavors.  I've never worked with anyone, or with any 
software, that can routinely dereference a URN.  I'm prepared to believe 
that URNs are dereferencable in principle; I find it hard to believe, 
based on the evidence I see, that this is easily done by ordinary people 
with ordinary tools.

So could you please expand on your argument.  Are you arguing that 
dereferencability in principle is good enough, and it's OK to place the 
onus on someone encountering one of these for the first time of doing 
the research to find out how one might go about finding the software to 
install and perform the dereferencing?

Or am I missing the boat on URNs and is it the case that I'm in a 
minority in my current inability to dereference URNs?

Actually, I don't think that the TAG needs to beat up on URNs to achieve 
its goal in this particular case; we should just say that namespace 
names SHOULD be URIs that may readily be dereference, and when 
dereferenced, yield human and machine readable information about the 
namespace.  When the time comes that URNs (or any other URI scheme) are 
easily dereferenced, they'll make good namespace names.   Right now, 
URNs do not make good namespace names. -Tim

Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 01:29:55 UTC