RE: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

Thanks for the endorsement.  I've been a bit remise in working on my draft recently.  I plan to make one more very minor pass over it, post an updated version, and then request IESG action as a Proposed Standard. But I'm certainly open to receiving comments now and, if the IESG chooses to proceed, there will be an opportunity for the community to comment during the Last Call.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Lanphier [mailto:robla@real.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 2:36 PM
To: Al Gilman; Tim Berners-Lee; Larry Masinter; harald@alvestrand.no;
Dan Zigmond; Rich Petke; Donald.Eastlake
Cc: uri@w3.org; Dan Connolly
Subject: RE: Excess URI schemes considered harmful


At 01:56 PM 9/25/01 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
>At 11:34 AM 2001-09-25 , Rob Lanphier wrote:
> >Please describe the *exact* encoding for the media type "text/plain" under
> >this scheme.
> >
>
>[Contingent on IANA endorsement what Mark Baker gave us] to refer to _exactly_
>what IANA had to say _today_ about the text/plain media type, I believe a
>valid
>reference could be spelled
>
><urn:tdb:20010925:http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/plain>
>
>For a reference which recovers what IANA had to say about that type
>designation as of when you use the reference, you could of course use simply:
>
>http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/plain
>
>... and this might return no recovered value for the resource some day.

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

At the end of the day, it would be great if this community could agree on 
*one* mapping between the two formats.  I'd get laughed out of the room if 
I suggested as a work item for our developer team to map the n-to-n 
possible ways a media type can be expressed as a URI as something we should 
implement in any of our products.

This infinitely flexible system may be just peachy in a dream world where 
implementers have infinite time to tinker around with all of the 
equivalencies, but at the end of the day, I'm really tired of people 
theorizing that a well-thought out media type <-> URI spec isn't necessary.

For those of you joining late (there were a couple of outdated email 
addresses in the "To:" line) the archive of this discussion is here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2001Sep/thread.html#18

...and I'm arguing in favor of the Eastlake proposal for doing URI<->Media 
Type mappings:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-eastlake-cturi-02.txt

Rob

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2001 16:42:04 UTC