Re: its name

On 2010-04-08, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> And the only reason I know of to use the term "URI" outside of a spec 
> is to be overly pedantic or to identify yourself as a Web Architecture 
> "expert" of some sort.

Yet that sort of thing *does* have some signaling value: usually you'd 
say "(web) address", because people can expect to find the stuff you're 
talking about "in the address" you gave them. That is, by just googling 
it or pasting the stuff onto an address bar in a browser. "Name" and URI 
on the other hand are expert stuff, and properly used e.g. when you do 
what I've done in the past, assigning nonreferenceable URI's to just 
about anything, including myself ( 
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.12798.1.2049.1.497 , and yes, there is a formal 
chain of delegation ;).

> Meanwhile, of course, many of the important new specs are using "IRI", 
> which does make a very important technical distinction, but is also 
> best kept far away from public discourse.

As a technical user of a character repertoire that is outside of ASCII, 
I haven't to this date understood why we should have either of IDN or 
IRI's. Names are names, and they tend to be pretty much incomprehensible 
even on today's Web. If people just Want/Need pretty titles for their 
resources, we could always do that at the application level. Why on 
*Earth* do we embed all of the ickiness that goes along with 
localisation into the basic resource names? I mean, it's ugly enough 
that those are drawn-out ASCII strings already...

> I suggest sticking with "Web Address" or "URL" when talking to people 
> who don't already know the details of httpRange-14 and RFC 3986.

Address. URL is a locator, so it intuitively functions like a 
physical/postal address does. It's just natural to call it an "address" 
where you can reach something/somebody, and which might also go stale at 
any moment. "URL" as a term is then superfluous and probably hampers 
even the mildly techno-nerdish from understanding how 
locations/addresses/URL's and True Names/URI'/URN's differ.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - decoy@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

Received on Thursday, 8 April 2010 18:50:58 UTC