Re: ISSUE-103: substantive issue that requires opinion + discussion

Ben Adida wrote:
> ISSUE-103: a URI-centric approach to CURIEs
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/103

Like Ivan, I tend to see CURIEs as more of a macro-expansion mechanism,
not a new URI scheme. The biggest benefit in my mind to Jonathan's
proposal is that we future proof CURIEs by using the "cu:foo:bar"
notation. If we go that route, I'd argue that we should spell out CURIE,
like so:

"curie:foo:bar" or "muri:foo:bar" (Macro-URI)

I can't see any down-side to that approach, although the only reason
we'd do it is to future-proof CURIEs. I don't see a great need to do
this now, and if there are issues in the future, there's no reason that
the W3C couldn't make the new mechanism "{foo:bar}" or "(foo:bar)" or
"newthing:foo:bar".

If we were to start from scratch, it would've been nice to adopt
"curie:foo:bar" and that's probably what would've happened... but I'm
concerned about changing things now. I don't think it really buys us
anything and even if we have made a great mistake, we can still recover
from it in the future by using a different signifier '{' instead of '[',
or '(' instead of '[', or adopting Jonathan's proposal when we run out
of signifiers.

We shouldn't change the CURIE syntax at this point - we'd be doing so
due to a belief that this decision is going to bite us down the line. As
a general rule, future-proofing against something we know we can dig
ourselves out of if we need to is unnecessary.

That being said, it's no big deal if we decide to adopt Jonathan's
proposal. I could go either way, but would like us to not unnecessarily
generate more work for everyone. If we were to make the change, we'd
have to make a sweep through the test cases, syntax document, primer,
and notify all implementers of the change, which could easily put us
back a month.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: DB Launches Medical Record Sales Service with Shepherd Medical
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/02/24/health2trade/

Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 14:34:25 UTC