Re: Announcement: The "info" URI Scheme

> On 2 Oct 2003 at 13:55, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> 
> > So it seems easier to you to get the info: scheme approved and
> > deployed than to deploy a web server?  If people were instead
> > encouraged to use
> > 
> >    http://niso.org/2003/isbn/0-13-103805-2
> > 
> > then NISO could provide whatever information it thought was helpful to
> > people who ended up doing an HTTP GET on it.   If it wanted to
> > mainting a proper ISBN database, it could provide information about
> > the book at that address; otherwise it could just point to some ISBN
> > resources and let people figure it out themselves.
> 
> But if, instead, a non-HTTP URI is used as the "canonical" means of 
> referring to books by ISBN (as, in fact, the "urn:isbn" namespace has 
> actually been registered and has an RFC defining it, as I recall), 
> then the end user has more flexibility in deciding what information 
> he/she wishes to retrieve on it.  When typed into a browser or 
> followed as a hyperlink, a "http" URI will always cause the resource 
> set up by the "owner" of that URI to be retrieved (or failed to be 
> retrieved in the case of 404 or DNS errors), while another scheme is 
> capable of user-driven configurability with regard to how to treat an 
> attempt to dereference it (or would be if browsers were sufficiently 
> advanced to give this capability, as I'd hope they'd be if such URIs 
> were in wide use).  I'd be able to set my browser to go to a page 
> related to that ISBN at niso.org, or amazon.com, or some other site 
> of my own choosing, or make a database query, or bring up a local 
> file from my own system, or whatever else I chose.

Well, you can do that with http as well. 

Linkbaton.com does something like that.   Try
        http://my.linkbaton.com/isbn/0-13-103805-2
and if you haven't configured linkbaton with your preferences to do
otherwise, you end up at the amazon page for that book, with a little
control window at the top for for access to other bookstores entries
on that book.

You end up trusting linkbaton.com to stay around vs. trusting people
to have the right software installed on their computer.  Hm.

Also, is there anything that says 
       http://niso.org/2003/isbn/0-13-103805-2
can't be intercepted by a proxy and suitably adorned?  I'm not sure
about that....

       -- sandro

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 15:16:51 UTC