Re: Proposal: 'tag' URIs

On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 05:13:48PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> At 04:20 PM 5/7/01 -0400, Michael Mealling wrote:
> >Nope. URNs have the requirement that once you assign a URN to its
> >Resource you can never reassign that URN to some other Resource.
> >Sure, you could assign a URN to whatever the http protocol gave you
> >on port 80 at cnn.com and that would be a useful thing because then
> >I could rely on the fact that, no matter what CNN did to cnn.com or
> >whether or not CNN even existed anymore, whenever I used that
> >URN I knew that someone hadn't changed the meaning out from under me.
> 
> So does this mean that changing the Resource is effectively creating a new 
> Resource?

Nope. URIs and URNs never define any concepts or operations that have
to do with the Resource other than the act of binding a URI/URN to one (which
is how a Resource comes into existence). The statement "changing
the Resource" has no meaning outside of some specific application that defines
what "change" means for that application space. Low level caching might
consider 'change' to be moving it from one IP address to another while
DAV might define it as a versioning event that doesn't care what IP
address it is currently at.



-MM

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Mealling	|      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
Sr. Research Engineer   |   www.ga.lp.org/gwinnett     | ICQ#:         14198821
Network Solutions	|          www.lp.org          |  michaelm@netsol.com

Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 17:19:40 UTC