Re: Talked to the xml.gov people

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 15:10, Tim Bray wrote:
> I was invited to talk about RDDL at the Federal XML Working Group this 
> morning (see http://xml.gov/agenda/20030521.htm).   As you might well 
> expect, the discussion got into the URN/URL thing, and the XRI effort 
> (of which I'm only dimly aware) got pulled in.  I pointed out our 
> various issues and discussions and threads, and made the argument about 
> persistence being a social/management thing, not a function of the URI 
> scheme.

Yes. Persistence is a social/management/policy thing. But you can make
that a function of the scheme by specifying those policies for that
scheme, which is what the 'urn:' scheme has done. Here's the key
difference: if I detect some non-persistent behavior from
'urn:isbn:123456-87' then I know based on the scheme that it wasn't my
error to have assumed the name was persistent. With 'http://foo.com' I
have no way of knowing whether or not I get to make that assumption.

There is no consensus that 'http' is the one true scheme for everything
so please stop claiming that it is...

-MM

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2003 15:36:31 UTC