RE: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

Harald,

I'll try to expand that part of my draft.

But basically, there are two communities. More MIME types are defined all the time. And more URI-syntax labels and typing systems are defined all the time.  Now, in fact, they are syntactically distinguishable ( URIs start with a token followed by a : and a MIME or Content type with a token followed by a / ). But somehow the theory that all email/http/etc. processing that is expecting a Content-Type is going to be changed to also allow URIs or that all the stuff that expects (or allows easy syntactic constraint to) URIs is going to be changed to allow Content-Types seems a bit unlikely :-) So if you happen to want to use a label/type from one community in a construct of the other community, you need to map and it seems like a good idea to have a standard way of doing that...

My initial motivation on this draft come from the joint IETF/W3C XMLDSIG working group where we were labeling various entities and got into extended arguments as to whether the label field should (1) be a MIME Type or (2) a Content Type or (3) a URI or (4) their should be alternate fields with different names for a URI label or a Content Type label or (5) a polyglot field that could hold either.  We ended up with a consensus that, in each case, that, for simplicity, it was best to require one specific syntax of label, for some objects going with a URI and for others a MIME Type.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:harald@alvestrand.no]
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 5:04 PM
To: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008; 'Rob Lanphier'
Cc: uri@w3.org; Dan Connolly; Al Gilman; Tim Berners-Lee; Larry
Masinter; Dan Zigmond; Rich Petke
Subject: RE: Excess URI schemes considered harmful

Don,
it would be quite useful if your draft would explain better WHY you need a 
mapping between these two quite dissimilar name spaces.

I have trouble imagining the case where you would want to use it.

                 Harald

--On 25. september 2001 16:41 -0400 Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 
<Donald.Eastlake@motorola.com> wrote:

> 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.

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2001 12:23:16 UTC