- From: Fisher Mark <FisherM@exch1.indy.tce.com>
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 11:01:25 -0500
- To: "'mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch'" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>, "'gtn@ebt.com'" <gtn@ebt.com>
- Cc: "'liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu'" <liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu>, "'gjw@wnetc.com'" <gjw@wnetc.com>, "'uri@Bunyip.Com'" <uri@bunyip.com>
Gavin, you write: >>Right. The fundamental argument here is whether URL's are supposed to >>be completely opaque or not. Given current usage, it's awfully hard >>to make a case for opaqueness... not that I think the opaque >>representation concept isn't useful: I think it's vital. The important point here is that URIs that can be meaningful can also be meaningless, but the converse is not generally true. For many applications, URIs that are meaningless to the casual observer are the right choice (the talked-about ISBN URN). In other cases, especially in Intranets, meaningful URIs are the right choice. BTW, does anyone know if the original CERN <URL:http://info.cern.ch/> Web started out by using meaningless URLs? (I only started on the Web in Dec. 1993, by which time CERN's URLs made sense to me.) Certainly, from what I understand, the original NextStep environment should have made using meaningless URLs easy, as the user should have been able to just treat them as magic cookies. >================================================ >Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics >fisherm@indy.tce.com Indianapolis, IN >
Received on Monday, 3 March 1997 11:04:14 UTC