Re: telephone URLs, comments on draft-antti-telephony-url-04

I go back and forth on this one
(whether to use hierarchical syntax
or the established social convention for
phone number notation). Currently, I agree
with Mr. Antti: the only time you could
exploit the relative addressing is if
somehow you referenced a nearby phone
in the context of another phone call;
meanwhile, the mnemonic and transcribability
benefit of the ITU notation is considerable.

But I suggest you make the rationale
behind this design decision explicit in
the draft, and note that it's an exception
to the guidelines[1]

[1] Guidelines for new URL Schemes
2.1.2 Compatibility with relative URLs
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/draft-ietf-urlreg-guide-02.txt

Thanks for digging through your archive, by
the way. I think if a bit more rationale
goes in the draft, it will save you that trouble
in the future.

Vaha-Sipila Antti (NMP) wrote:
> L. Masinter:
> > If there is some context that is missing, then relative URL forms
> > are used, with the base supplying the rest of the form.
> [...]
> > so that you would write
> >   phone://358/55/1234567;postd=pp22
> > instead of
> >   phone:+358-55-1234567;postd=pp22
> > This is consistent with the URI generic syntax.


> E.123, which is an ITU-T recommendation for phone numbers, uses the
> "normal" notation. Splitting the phone numbers to a relative URL based
> on their components is against the well-known practice of how people
> write phone numbers, and since phone numbers have been around a bit
> longer than URLs (almost a century?), in my opinion we should definitely
> have "legacy support" here.

-- 
Dan Connolly
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
phone:+44-22-76-79508 (room at CERN in Geneva, 21-26 Jun 1998)

Received on Thursday, 2 July 1998 22:02:38 UTC