Addendum to TAG Review of XRI 2.0

This note is an addendum to our review [1] of the XRI proposal.  We 
offer this partly in reply to an earlier comment from Dave McAlpin, who 
clarified that although "XRI borrows heavily from generic URI syntax" 
never-the-less "XRI in its native form can't be a URI scheme". [2]

The TAG feels strongly that this clarification does not undermine our
review as written.  On the contrary, a key principle of Web
Architecture is that resources should be named with URIs, so finding
that XRIs are in fact not intended as URIs adds to rather than reduces
our concern.

Furthermore, by using a syntax that is so nearly identical to that of
URIs, the XRI proposal risks causing confusion.  How will casual or
even expert users know which such strings are intended for use on the
Web and which not?  In that respect, this seems the worst of all
possible worlds, and we would therefore not only re-iterate our
original advice, that the functionality XRIs seek to deliver can best
be delivered by using http: URIs [3], but add the advice that URIs are
the core of the Web, and you should use them:

     "*Good practice: Identify with URIs*

       "To benefit from and increase the value of the World Wide Web,
        agents should provide URIs as identifiers for resources." [4]

W3C Tag
(p.p. Henry S. Thompson, by and on behalf of the TAG)

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0095.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005May/0029.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#URI-scheme
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#pr-use-uris
-- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]

Received on Friday, 13 May 2005 13:11:30 UTC