Re: Announcement: The "info" URI scheme

> I don't see why all of the above cannot be addressed using
> http: URIs.

I hesitate to even enter this discussion, but whether or not every
identifier in the universe can or cannot be addressed by using an
"http" URI, it is only reasonable to state that opinion once and
move on.  If folks want to define a hundred new schemes, it won't
change how the Web works, nor is the Web actively harmed by new
schemes that are never deployed on the Web.  I have no problem
letting the market decide such issues, providing that no standards
organization defines any scheme (including "http") as the one and
only right way to identify things.

There is one other item that needs to be mentioned, which seems
to have been ignored by all of the proposals for meta-schemes:
any URI, no matter how abstract its referent or how obscure the
scheme, can be placed in the context of a dereferencing system
that supplies representations of whatever is supposedly identified
by that URI.  All it takes is one HTTP proxy and the willingness
of someone to do the mapping.  As soon as that happens, people will
start using that URI to indirectly identify various aspects of
those representations.  In other words, claims that the addition
of a new scheme will somehow "solve" the "car" versus "description
of a car" problem is ludicrous, at least for any scheme that is
ever sufficiently useful to justify deployment.


Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software
                  5251 California Ave., Suite 110
                  Irvine, CA  92612-3074            fax:+1.949.679.2972
                  (roy.fielding@day.com) <http://www.day.com/>

                  Co-founder, The Apache Software Foundation
                  (fielding@apache.org)  <http://www.apache.org/>

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 05:10:13 UTC