RE: comments on draft-eastlake-cturi-01.txt

URLs that are responsibly constructed and well managed will be as persistent
as the committment of the organizations that manage them.

The vulnerabilities discussed in these messages simply don't pertain to well
managed URLs (that is, managed according to publically stated policies and
with reasonable attention to IPR issues).

stu


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Mealling [mailto:michael@bailey.dscga.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2001 3:26 AM
To: Aaron Swartz
Cc: Larry Masinter; Donald E. Eastlake 3rd; uri@w3.org; Graham Klyne;
Michael Mealling; Ted Hardie
Subject: Re: comments on draft-eastlake-cturi-01.txt


On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 12:21:26AM -0600, Aaron Swartz wrote:
> Larry Masinter <masinter@Adobe.COM> wrote:
> > That you, Aaron Swartz, do not see the need to use anything
> > other than "http://www.iana.org", which has sufficient
> > stability for your own purposes, doesn't mean that it will
> > meet the needs of everyone else.
> > 
> > I suppose this argument will persist until we resolve
> > the W3C/IETF split over the utility of URNs and their
> > role in protocol element identification.
> 
> I hate to see this argument pointlessly persist, so I will stop arguing
> after this question:
> 
> Why aren't my URLs safe? That is, why do I have to worry about an address
at
> iana.org suddenly disappearing one day? What needs are not met by this
> system?

From my standpoint there are two reasons:

One of the main reasons is that due to existing case law you 
don't own your domain-name (the same way you don't own your telephone
number). If a court says so a registry is required to remove that
domain-name from service and either not give it back out to anyone or
sell it to someone (probably a competitor).

Reason two: since there is nothing inherent to domain-names or
http or anything else, the only way I know I can use your
URLs anytime beyond tomorrow afternoon is that you have told me so.
That may be fine if I interact with you on a daily basis but
if I come across some URI 'in the wild' I have no idea how
persistent it may be and if I do act as though it were useable
beyond tomrrow afternoon then _I_ am the one making an error in
assumptions. Now, if the URI scheme requires that it be persistent
then I can start doing some pretty powerful things since I can
now make that assumption safely. If the URI I find 'in the wild'
is part of that scheme and it doesn't follow those rules then
I know that it is an error in the network, not in my making
erroneous assumptions....


> I use URLs for a lot of the work I do and I'm curious whether I'm making a
> mistake.

Probably not for most cases. But if you plan on using a URI 10 or 20
years from now it just might be a problem. Heck, there was a large amount
of discussion at the last IETF about creating a new DNS class
and changing the rules _completely_ (in a new class you don't
have to follow any of the old rules, including delegation models).

-MM

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Received on Sunday, 21 January 2001 09:27:04 UTC