- From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995 12:02:38 -0400
- To: "Karen R. Sollins" <sollins@lcs.mit.edu>
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
Hi Karen! [ You wrote: ] } Peter, } } We've been through some of these arguments about the degree of } user-friendliness before (I'm sure you were there - didn't we do some } of this in Houston?) <sigh> Yup... } . . . I believe that } we've perpetuated a slight mistake in the URI WG by calling these } things URNs ("names") because too people assume that a name has to be } human friendly. These things should be as human unfriendly as we can } get away with, to discourage their direct use by humans. They are } serving a different purpose at a different level of abstraction than } human friendly names. I agree, we're definitely talking about two sets of functionality here, although I'm not yet convinced there's something wrong with calling these things "names". We just need to be careful about what we think we can do with them. For me, the requirements for comparision and dereferencing remain the defining elements. Depending upon how we do it, I think dereferencing does mean we need a human friendly part for when humans must select these things. For dereferencing, we obviously want to focus on the mechanical processing capabilities and might be willing to sacrifice readibility here if it makes it work. Taken together this probably means that a URN probably needs two components, and that we need to be able to process/handle the two separately. Still, I think they also need to remain bound together as in gopher menu items. So, perhaps this means a URN should look like: <naming authority>:[<optional human readible string]>:<unique ID> Note! I'm not proposing a syntax, I'm proposing a set of components here... - peterd -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ...there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existance will be in a great measure dependent on ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us... - Samuel Butler, 1872 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Sunday, 25 June 1995 12:06:25 UTC