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

On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 10:26:41AM +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
> >2) Consider an infrastructure for providing metadata and perhaps
> >      'resolution' to an entity body which can be applied to all URIs,
> >      regardless of schema.  In a strong sense, this is all about
> >      metadata, and even the entity body can be considered a perverse
> >      form of metadata for URIs.
> 
> ... I think the problem is that any particular piece of infrastructure can 
> apply only to some part of the uses to which URIs may be put.  (I'll 
> suggest that even DDDS is not a universal solution for every imaginable URI.)

Correct. It _can_ be used to find out some minimal types of information
about novel or unsupported URIs but even then its won't allow an application
to completely duplicate that URIs features. For example, the URI Resolution
application could tell you things about a URI but, unless you have access
to the NNTP protocol to be able to make use of the 'news:' URI scheme,
it won't do you much good beyond telling you that you do indeed need
the NNTP library in order to get any namespace specific functionality out of it.

-MM


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Received on Sunday, 29 October 2000 18:20:23 UTC