Re: URLs on iana.org, was: Draft minutes from TAG telcon of 2008-10-02

Jonathan Rees wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 7:50 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de
> <mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     My understanding is that (as of now) the IANA is unwilling to
>     guarantee *anything* about how they serve web content. I'd be
>     surprised if they cared about the fine points of the 303 status
>     code; for now they are even discouraging use of the registration
>     URLs in specifications
>     (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5226#section-5.1>):
>
>            Note 2: When referring to an existing registry, providing a URL
>            to precisely identify the registry is helpful.  Such URLs,
>            however, should usually be removed from the RFC prior to final
>            publication, since IANA URLs are not guaranteed to be stable in
>            the future.  In cases where it is important to include a URL in
>            the document, IANA should concur on its inclusion.
>
>     BR, Julian
>
>
> Fascinating - thanks for the alert. They are saying in effect that
> URIs should not be used to identify things (at least not in RFCs),
> which is different advice from what I've heard elsewhere.
>
> Maybe this means we need to set up a mirror for all RFC-referenced
> registries elsewhere, with ARK-like resolution of the registered URIs
> via a parallel set of locations? (Probably there's already such a thing.)
>
> (This is a classic case of a failure mode I've been concerned about -
> URIs that become important to a community, are stored in places that
> are difficult or impossible to change, and are then abandoned by the
> domain owner - essentially the 404 problem, but with the stakes
> ratcheted up a notch or two. I'm predicting trouble along these lines
> in the next few years, despite our best efforts at discouraging use of
> not-so-cool URIs in such places and encouraging persistent resolution,
> and will be very interested to see how the affected community responds.)
Since this is relatively important for at least SemWeb people, has
anyone from the W3C ever contacted IANA about their policy? After all,
they may be amendable to changing it. If I remember correctly from the
"Link" header discussion, all that was wanted sometimes was URIs for
various sundry media-types and Link values.

If IANA is unwilling to host "cool" URIs, perhaps the W3C could host
such mappings. Then RFCs could at least reference this mappings.

          -harry

> Jonathan
>

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2008 14:12:54 UTC