Re: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

At 04:14 PM 9/26/01 +0100, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> > I tend to think that effective use of urns might, in the
> > longer term, help to limit the profusion of URI schemes.
>
>So then we'll just have a profusion of URN namespace IDs! It would be quite
>easy to delegate URI schemes in the same way that URN namespaces are
>delegated: perhaps even with an informal URI scheme tree, "uri-1:",
>"uri-2:" etc.

Yup, that's fine.  Because different URN nids don't require different 
handling by software that handles them (unlike different URI schemes, which 
MAY require different handling).

 From TimBL's original posting in this thread:
>The Web depends on a very high shared knowledge of the properties of
>URI schemes. New ones should only be introduced is absolutely necessary.

Here, the different URN nids serve to indicate different name allocation 
authorities, which are significant at the point a particular URN is minted, 
but which thereafter can all be treated alike;  I believe a "very high 
shared knowledge of the properties of" URNs is already present, because 
they don't really have any significant properties other than being unique, 
persistent names.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
GK@NineByNine.org

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2001 11:39:20 UTC