Re: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

> AG:: Because the standard syntax is only safe (recognizable)
> the RFC-822 header context.  The point of URIs is that they
> creates a single non-colliding space for "references outside
> this context" which is not aware of what is a type, what is an
> instance, or much of anything else.

It depends really upon the context of use of the identifier, and how useful
it is to refer to (in this case) the content type as a first class object
with a single identifier, rather than creating some machinery to identify
it as an unambiguous term within the system.

For example, RDF doesn't particularly need a URI scheme to identify media
types, because it's much easier to just invent a predicate relationship
between some node and a literal value, which is to the effect that the
literal value is the unique MIME type for the subject.

   :mimeType a daml:UniqueProperty .
   <http://example.org/> :mimeType "text/html" .

The benefit there is that it's a 30 second hack using DAML, rather than a
consensus based registration process that may take months, and for the
payoff that you have to have systems that recognize DAML. In the RDF
context, that isn't much of a setback.

So I disagree that MIME content type labels are only safe in the context of
RFC 822 headers, but I do agree that on many occasions a URI scheme/URN
namespace for them would be more than helpful.

Cheers,

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2001 11:41:30 UTC