Re: Announcement: The "info" URI Scheme

On 2003-10-02 21:59, "ext Daniel R. Tobias" <dan@tobias.name> wrote:

> 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.

Such 3rd party support is also provided by URIQA, but without losing
the fundamental ability to obtain authoritative information based on
the URI alone without having to know *where* to look for that
authoritative information.

A given info: URI, by itself, cannot tell you where to look for its
authoritative interpretation. That IMO is a fatal shortcoming within
the context of the Web and SW.

(if you never plan for info: URIs to be used in such a context,
then pretty much everything I say on this topic is irrelevant).

Cheers,

Patrick

Received on Friday, 3 October 2003 06:22:46 UTC