Re: URIs-Resource relationships

At 05:54 PM 9/7/00 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
>At 11:47 AM 9/7/00 -0400, liberte@crystaliz.com wrote:
>>I think we also understand and agree that some applications need more
>>constraints.  But one question is whether those constraints might
>>retroactively apply to all applications or only some.   I believe the
>>answer should be only some, to avoid over constraining, and to be
>>backward compatible with already deployed applications.
>
>This feels all wrong to me... I think I must be missing something here.  I 
>think constraints, where needed, are a matter for each application and 
>should _never_ apply retroactively to other applications.

Whether applications update their behavior or not is one of those
continuing problems of software design, not something that should be used
to avoid correcting mistakes.

Uniform processing for URIs would have saved a lot of us a hell of a lot of
trouble, and still could.

Leaving the spec as vague as possible may be exciting to some folks, and
may avoid some categories of political irritation, but isn't useful to a
large group of people faced with the task of figuring out exactly how these
identifiers are supposed to work.  

A spec that says "any way you want" isn't very much of a spec, is it?

RFC 2396 isn't very far from that, I'm afraid.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 13:29:20 UTC