Re: feature negotiation syntax

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen:
>
>At 10:23 AM 5/13/97 PDT, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>>So I'm wary of using URLs in PEP or in feature negotiation
>>as a way of identifying content types and features. It's not
>>that it is unworkable, but the issue needs to be addressed.
>
>But URLs don't all have to point to "http://my-flacky-company.com/~henrik".
>Well-proven extensions can point to (hopefully) stable things like IANA,
>IETF, ISO, W3C, and the like. I can see no reason why URLs can not be just
>as reliable as registered tokens. To me, this is a question of policy, not
>technology :-)

I agree.  I also like to add that I see no big problem in continuing
to use the "http://my-flacky-company.com/~henrik" extension if the
server dies, or is taken over.  A malicious party could take over the
my-flacky-company.com domain and bind different semantics to the URL
rather than not serving it anymore, but I don't think this social risk
is much bigger than lots of other identity theft risks we have in the
internet.

I must admit though that, the more I think about using URLs as
identifiers, the more attractive IANA-based registration seems.  I
therefore plan to rework the feature tag registration draft into a
x:/ftag:/whatever: URI registration draft, which allows parties to
reserve chunks of a hierarchical namespace, so that people have an
alternative to URLs.

Koen.

Received on Wednesday, 14 May 1997 13:12:49 UTC