"work with the grain of the Web" and other bits of edsu wisdom Re: Centralization, redundancy, and survivability

On 24 Mar 2011, at 11:33, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote:

> Sorry I haven't been more involved for the past week or so. I blame the W3C for standardizing XML Schemas and thus dooming old programmers like me to be maintenance slaves. :-(
> 
> Simon Spero wrote:
>> A few brief notes:
>> 
>> 1.  Assigning identifiers that are guaranteed not to have been assigned
>>  by another agent does not require a centralized repository of all
>> identifiers; it merely requires a partitioning of the name space such
>> that no part of the name space is delegated to more than one agent.
> 
> I agree, but would cut to the chase and tell people to use the http URI scheme to identify everything. Ed blogged about this recently: <http://inkdroid.org/journal/2011/03/22/geeks-bearing-gifts/>.

Thanks for this -- I hope we'll put this part directly into our report:
"Libraries and other cultural heritage institutions should make every effort to work with the grain of the Web, and taking URLs seriously is a big part of that. "

Similarly, some analogue of 
"Bugs and vulnerabilities associated with these software libraries are routinely discovered and fixed, often because the software itself is available as open source, and there are “many eyes” looking at the source code. "

And, 
don't become
"dependent on niche software and services."

-Jodi