Re: Proposal for an "address:" URI Scheme

Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com> wrote:

> I'm having second thoughts about constraining people to the direction
> in which they should put these now anyway. Reason being, both the
> U.S.A. and the U.K. do it "the wrong way around", i.e. put the object
> (e.g. person) first, whereas other postal systems (such as Russia) use
> it the proper way around. There seems to be no confliction whatsoever
> when sending mail between countries that have different postal
> addressing schemes. Therefore, I think that the recommendation should
> be that the direction of the scheme parts comply with the postal
> scheme practises of the target country.

I strongly disagree. This will get you into nasty postal address conflicts.
For example, let's say I live in Russia and own a company called
Understanding Systems. My URI would be:

address:ru/00000/xxx/us

which would be indistinguishable from the American who runs Real
Universality:

address:ru/00000/xxx/us

It's just a bad idea in general. And you toss out the authority idea. URIs
are usually hierarchical -- I see no reason to break with that practice and
threaten the understanding/parsing of the entire scheme. This way, display
systems (like the one you demonstrated) can output going forward and
backwards depending on the conventions of the country they are used in. Of
course, we will still allow each country to define what goes after their
country code.


-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2001 21:25:27 UTC