- From: Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:13:33 -0400
- To: "'Mark Baker'" <distobj@acm.org>
- Cc: "'Julian Reschke'" <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, "'Michael\(tm\) Smith'" <mike@w3.org>, <public-html@w3.org>
-----Original Message----- From: mark@coactus.com [mailto:mark@coactus.com] On Behalf Of Mark Baker Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 2:46 PM To: Justin James Cc: Julian Reschke; Michael(tm) Smith; public-html@w3.org Subject: Re: heads-up about "new" URLs section in HTML5 editor's draft >> Most people can't tell the difference between a URI and a URL and use the >> terms interchangeably. Heck, I can barely discern the distinction most of >> the time. Do we really want to make things even more confusing? > That's my point. We *do* want them to be able to at least recognize > there's a difference, which is why calling HTML-embedded URIs, URLs, > isn't such a great idea IMO. At the risk of sounding ignorant, but if 95% of developers don't know that there even is a concept called "URI" that is separate from the concept called "URL", and if 50% of the remaining 5% don't remember/don't use/don't care about the difference, then does it really matter? Would it be possible to raise the issue with the URI group and say, "hey, this is clearly a needless distinction, can we fold the two together, make 'URI' and 'URL' synonyms, and be done with it?" Clearly, interchanging the two labels has not hurt anyone. I know that issues with URI/URL are not in the domain of this particular group, but let's get real. HTML and related technologies (HTTP, JavaScript, CGI, etc.) is where probably 99.9999% of URIs and URLs get published and consumed. How many times do you see a telnet URI for instance? I see this time and time and time again in these W3C standards, they make sense only to people with both a PhD in Computer Science and a Master's degree in linguistics. They are completely worthless to 90%+ of actual developers because even if someone could understand what they say, it is impossible for all but a few geniuses to actually hold enough of a spec in their head to use it successfully while performing real world work. J.Ja
Received on Friday, 27 June 2008 20:14:56 UTC