Re: Naming ports vs. naming documents

/ Alessandro Vernet <avernet@orbeon.com> was heard to say:
| Alright, then I will rephrase that: I do not feel comfortable allowing
| authors to use URIs with schemes that come with an expected semantic
| (like http://www.google.com/xhtml) to make references to documents
| produced in the pipeline. And at the same time I agree: we should try
| not to invent our own scheme.
|
| Can we conciliate these two constraints? In a MIME encoded message, an
| image can be embedded and referenced through a URI. But for those
| images we don't use just any URI, but we use URIs with the cid: scheme
| [1]. Would the cid: scheme make sense in our case? What other schemes
| could we consider?

I think the supported schemes should be application-defined. I
certainly want to be able to generate http: scheme URIs with
components and I will subsequently want to use those URIs in other
components. Now, it happens, in the cases I have in mind, I will also
eventually serialize those resources to the URIs in question.

But if we give people the freedom to generate HTTP URIs (which I feel
we must) and we allow components to communicate with HTTP URIs "out of
band" (which I feel we really should), then I don't see any way to
prevent people from doing foolish things like providing alternate
versions of the home pages for companies they don't represent.

In my youth, I took a "VM/CMS Internals" programming course. The
instructors were very good and very thorough. For each topic
introduced, they'd cover all the useful, documented, supported things
you could do with a particular API. Then they'd cover all the really
useful, undocumented, unsupported things you could do with it. The
first time they described one of these undocumented uses, they took
great pains to explain how it was risky to do this and, while it was
sometimes necessary, it was dangerous and if you got hurt doing it,
you had no one to blame but yourself.

They introduced each subsequent undocumented use with the cautionary
refain "your gun, your bullet, your foot."

I think a pipeline that includes a component that generates
"http://www.google.com/xhtml" and another component that consumes it
falls into the category of "your gun, your bullet, your foot."

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
XML Standards Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc.