- From: Roy Fielding <fielding@beach.w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 19:20:51 -0400
- To: Jon Knight <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
>On Fri, 11 Aug 1995, Roy Fielding wrote:
>> I'd just like to point out that most of this discussion is ignoring
>> the fact that the transcribability of URLs is one of the main reasons
>> the WWW has been successful in building an information base.
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/People/Fielding
>>
>> ismn:893505109550819789356548054910
>
>If that number included check digits and/or error correcting digits then
>the latter might actually aid transcribability (so would splitting it up
>into smaller sections with punctuation characters such as
>ismn:8935.0510.9550.8197.8935.6548.0549.10).
Error correcting digits on a decimal field value? Keep in mind that
it would require an awful lot of digits for a world-unique value,
and that the error-correcting digits would also need to be transcribed.
>If I had one pound for every mis-printed URL I've come across or person
>coming to ask me how to access a mis-transcribed URL, I'd be a rich man by
>now. I don't think that current URLs are perfect when it comes to
>transcribability, do you?
No, but I've never come across a human-readable, but mis-transcribed, URL
which I could not figure out the correct transcription just by looking
at it. If the names are meaningful, humans are better error-correctors
than machines.
....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
(fielding@w3.org) (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
Received on Saturday, 12 August 1995 19:21:05 UTC