Re: Using http: for naming not so obvious

2008/6/13 Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>:

> On Jun 12, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Jonathan Rees wrote:
>
>> The problem comes from people who don't think a DNS domain name and the
>> server connected to it can survive mergers, acquisitions, rebranding,
>> bankruptcies, carelessness, lawsuits, and other forces of nature. They think
>> (a) that their naming system if http-based would catastrophically fail if
>> DNS failed in one of these ways, and (b) that they can set up a naming
>> system that is more abstract and timeless than is http: so that DNS risks
>> are avoided. In some cases they have the wisdom to see that the best bet for
>> surviving DNS vagaries (or any other kind of protocol calamity) would come
>> from replication (so that names can be looked up in more than one way, just
>> as physical books are found in more than one library), but that is rare.
>>
>
> Really, it has far more to do with a basic misunderstanding of
> web architecture, namely that you have to use HTTP to get a
> representation of an "http" named resource.


Once the domain name gets owned by somebody else (via an acquisition, etc.),
the new owners may legally force you to discontinue the use of any of their
URI space, by reasons ranging from the use of their registered trademark to
whatever reason that you are misleading customers, and a judge will just
believe it. Not to mention that some agents may try to dereference those
URIs and the new owner may claim that your're orchestrating a DDOS attack.

If there would be some (legal) protection in using a http URI independent of
the owner of the domain, maybe people would give them a try.

Maybe something like tag uri scheme which addresses this authority vs. time
would be helpful to have on http URIs.

Cheers,
-- 
Laurian Gridinoc, http://purl.org/net/laur