- From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 10:21:51 -0500
- To: timeless@gmail.com
- Cc: "Marcos Caceres" <marcosscaceres@gmail.com>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, public-webapps <public-webapps@w3.org>, "public-pkg-uri-scheme-request@w3.org" <public-pkg-uri-scheme-request@w3.org>
On Dec 6, 2008, at 9:58 AM, timeless wrote: > On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Jonathan Rees > <jar@creativecommons.org> wrote: >> I hate to burst ignorantly into a discussion I know little about... >> but >> that's what I'm going to do. Forgive me. >> >> Regarding the creation of local URIs for use in APIs requiring >> URIs: I want >> to consider, just as a what-if meant for clarification of >> requirements, the >> use of the tag: URI scheme [1], which appears on first blush to be >> a good >> fit. >> >> Suppose that the desired suffix of the URI is to be zzz. The URI >> would look >> like >> >> tag:widgets-r-us.org,2008:8948372837/zzz > > i'm 99% certain this is in the minutes from the F2F, a WUA needs to be > able to instantiate multiple discreet instances of a widget, and needs > to be able to distinguish them. the instances need to be distinct. > Whether distinct instances should be able to enumerate and connect is > not currently decided but for future improvement the scheme shouldn't > prohibit this. OK, if you need to distinguish the instances, give each a different tag: URI. You could identify the instance using an entropy-generated bit string, and maintain a mapping from bit string to instance. Or, if you have some other way to designate an entity internally, such as process id + index into a table, you could put that information, or a hash of it, into the tag: URI, in combination with entropy or some other hash if you like. I hope it is clear that I'm not specifying a particular way to choose the tag: URI, as I can't because I don't know details of your requirements or architecture (sorry). The question was: Using tag: you can do just about anything you want in the way of exposing and/or hiding information (probably ten or twenty options here depending on what information and entropy feeds in and how/when/ whether it's hashed), so why not use tag: ? In other words, if you think file: and http: have problems, the tag: URI scheme might provide a way out that does not require registering a new URI scheme. You still have a design problem (which you would have regardless), but at least you avoid one source of unpleasantness. Jonathan
Received on Saturday, 6 December 2008 15:22:34 UTC