- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 10:34:40 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Tim Bray writes: >CP2. When specifying the use of URIs, designers SHOULD NOT constrain >the use of URI schemes. <buzzer /> Unconstrained use of URIs and URI schemes seems like the best way to make the notion of the Web both meaningless and hopelessly complicated over the next ten years. It's time to put the "URIs are magic pixie dust" principles back in the bottle and start encouraging people to ask what exactly they are doing in using URIs. Those questions include: * What am I identifiying? * What is an appropriate scheme for identifying THAT? * Am I identifying resources (URIs) or representations (URI references)? * How do I expect others to interpret my identification? These MAY be questions that the users of a specification have to decide rather than the designers, but telling designers that they SHOULD NOT consider these questions in the course of a design seems foolhardy. Widely-ignored notions about the opacity of identifiers don't mean that you can stop thinking about the paths from identifier to resource. ------------- Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA http://simonstl.com may be my URI http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
Received on Monday, 18 November 2002 10:34:35 UTC