Re: URx Questions

On 21 Jan 2002 at 17:11, Patrick Stickler wrote:

 > There is, I feel, a significant difference between might not resolve
 > and must not resolve. It is true that a resource denoted by a URN may
 > never have a digital representation instantiated at any given location,
 > but that doesn't make such a URN the equivalent of a URP.

But, to play "devil's advocate" for the contemporary paradigm (after
my earlier arguments in favor of a more elaborate taxonomy), "never"
is a very long time... things tend to change, sometimes in
unpredictable ways, but their names don't always change accordingly --
  look at the Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz, whose team names made
more sense when they were the Minneapolis Lakers and New Orleans
Jazz.

Thus, when somebody assigns a name in a particular URI scheme to
something based on his assessment of whether or not that "something"
ever will be resolvable on the Internet, this assessment may well be
contradicted by later events, leading to a need for a kludged-up
method of resolving URIs of a form that were supposed to be defined
to be unresolvable, or contrariwise, to the continued use of URIs to
things no longer resolvable that use schemes that indicate supposedly
resolvable resources, because they've embedded themselves as
identifiers in some context where they can't easily be changed.

--
Dan
Dan's Web Tips: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2002 14:49:59 UTC