- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 14:45:36 -0800
- To: www-tag@w3.org
1. URI Ambiguity In Web Architecture, URIs identify resources. They are also useful in other roles, but this should not normally lead to ambiguity in the identification function. Consider the following scenario: a software-development group building a database of information about companies might choose to use the URI of each company's Web site as a unique lookup key, since URIs have useful properties of uniqueness, longevity, and moderate length. In this application, the Web site URI is being used indirectly to identify the company. The same software-development group might build a another database of web pages, very likely indexed by URI. However, this does not mean that the company has become its Web site, that some Web-page record is actually a company, that the fields of the two databases would be consistent, or that the URIs would necessarily be useful as a basis for merging. Similarly, people can be identified by their email addresses. When conference organizers ask attendees to register by giving their email addresses, both parties know that they are using the mailbox identifier indirectly to identify the person. The resource identified by the URI "mailto:nadia@example.com" is still a mailbox, not a person. ... continue with Moby-Dick ... Cheers, Tim Bray http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
Received on Saturday, 15 November 2003 17:45:43 UTC