Re: theory and practice (Re: URIs for Physical Items)

On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 02:11:36PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> At 01:52 PM 10/27/00 -0400, Michael Mealling wrote:
> >So the issue is getting a URI as some value in a protocol or document
> >element and, since you don't have control over it you have no way to 
> >be sure that the relationship between the URI and the Resource is
> >what you expected?
> 
> You may not even have a faint clue what the URI means, since there are so
> many potential schemes for URIs.  That tends to make it rather difficult to
> make any claims about the Resource.  

IMHO, an application that defines an element that can take _any_ URI scheme
as a value needs to specify how it handles this problem or if it cares that
it is a problem. In lots of specs that use URIs this was never done and it 
has come back to bite us. There are several cases where I would preferred
that the application specify a limited set of URIs that were applicable.

> (In the case of http, it isn't even clear what statements can be made about
> a given http URI, though the scheme is certainly familiar.)

Yep....

> A means of retrieving supporting metadata would at least provide a
> possibility of getting some information, if not an assurance.

RESCAP is supposed to be solving that issue....

-MM

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Michael Mealling	|      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
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Received on Friday, 27 October 2000 14:33:30 UTC