So what is the problem with URIs?

Hi,

I've just read through the URI-spec list discussion to date, and find myself 
rather confused about what it actually hopes to achieve.

I've been writing software and specifications that work with URIs for over a 
decade, and throughout that time I've found RFC3986 has been a perfectly good 
specification for what it covers, viz:
- defining the syntax of a string used as a URI
- identifying parts that can be extracted from a valid URI (*)
- a specification for resolving a relative reference to a full (absolute) URI

There are many things that one might do with URIs, or ways in which they might 
be constructed, that are not covered by RFC3986.  In my view, that's a feature, 
not a bug.

So, in my view, I think a URI spec activity would usefully use RFC3986 (or 
successor) as a base specification, and create additional specs that describe 
additional usage-oriented aspects; e.g. a URI parsing API, a procedure for 
converting a manually entered string into a URI string, handling of URIs as 
identifiers vs URIs as locators, internationalization issues, etc.

As such, I think a list of perceived problems might be more useful than a single 
problem statement.  Then it might be reasonable to discuss which of those 
problems are realistically addressable.

#g


(*) there's some variability here that might usefully be regularized for URI 
handling libraries; e.g. does a scheme include the trailing ":", but I've never 
found this to be a major problem.

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2014 06:32:43 UTC