RE: COMURI

In relation to Tomas' proposal COMURI, I'd like to raise an issue with
what he calls "Common sense URIs: human and machine friendly, compact,
simple, and with mnemonics".

 

Having worked in several projects looking at URI guidelines, I am
starting to question whether a requirement that URIs should be
'human-friendly' makes sense at all.

 

I see three arguments against that requirement:

 

1.  URIs are mainly for machines. Most URIs will appear in metadata
statements like

 

dcterms:publisher <http://purl.org/dc/aboutdcmi#DCMI> ;

 

Statements like these will be used by software (e.g. harvester, indexer)
that will do a GET on the URI and then do something with the data that
comes back. If the program wants to show something to a human user, it
will probably show the data that sits behind the URI rather than the URI
itself. So I would think that a normal user will never see the URI
(except developers who use debuggers to see what happens behind the
scenes)

 

2.  I don't think normal users will ever want to type in URIs. Even now,
I see no-one who types in full URL in the address bar of the browser.
Does anyone in the group ever type in
https://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/wiki/Main_Page? I guess not; either you
have a bookmark, or you search for "w3c dwbp". I know people who go to
facebook every day and always type in "facebook" in the search box, then
click twice (once to search, once on the first hit); it's more
efficient: they hit ten keys that way, rather than the 13 keys to type
in "facebook.com <enter>". There is even a rumour that Google is
considering to suppress the URL completely from the address bar in
Chrome. And if someone does put a full URL in the address bar, it is
always through cut and paste.

 

3.  And a real problem is that as soon as you talk to people about
human-friendly URIs, they immediately want to include semantics in the
URI (organisational branding, collection names, concept names, resource
types) -- and I strongly agree with Dan Brickley who wrote
(https://www.w3.org/wiki/User:Rcygania2/RulesOfThumb#Namespace_URIs)
First rule of namespace URI design "you're more likely to regret things
you included, than things you omitted".

 

So I would say that making URIs human-friendly only benefits a very
small set of use cases and in some cases creates more problems than it
solves.

 

 

Makx.

 

 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Manuel.CARRASCO-BENITEZ@ec.europa.eu [mailto:Manuel.CARRASCO-

> BENITEZ@ec.europa.eu]

> Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 3:49 PM

> To: public-dwbp-wg@w3.org

> Subject: COMURI

> 

> Dear WG members,

> 

> Please could you comment on

>   Compact Uniform Resource Identifier (COMURI)

>    <http://dragoman.org/comuri> http://dragoman.org/comuri

>   mirror -   <https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/med/dragoman/comuri>
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/med/dragoman/comuri

> 

> It is nearly completed and as per the calendar, the First Public

> Working Draft is planned by the 30 Sep

>    <http://www.w3.org/2013/meeting/dwbp/2014-08-22#URI_construction>
http://www.w3.org/2013/meeting/dwbp/2014-08-22#URI_construction

> 

> The language in the final version will be corrected by a proof-reader.

> 

> Regards

> Tomas