- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:02:29 -0400
- To: uri@w3.org
- Cc: draft-king-vnd-urlscheme-03.txt@roke.hawke.org
Re: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-king-vnd-urlscheme-03.txt
The text clarifies that the term "vendor" isn't actually intended to
mean "vendor".
> The term "vendor" is used in this document for simplicity.
It seems to me that this moves the complexity from the the RFC out
into the world of everyone using the schemes. The term "vendor" would
be quite confusing (or even offensive) for organizations which clearly
set themselves aside from "vendors", such as consortia (eg W3C),
governments, universities, and industrial users.
My first idea is to mirror the DNS approach. It's imperfect as well,
but at least people are used to it. The W3C would use org-w3-*, MIT
would use edu-mit-*, the University of Manchester would use
uk-ac-man-*. Of course, in this case, going back to "." instead of
"-" would be very nice. And it all runs afoul of the fact that domain
names can be taken from people and organizations without their
consent. (Java package names use this approach, more or less.)
An simpler approach is to just add the term "org" along side "vnd" and
"prs".
Even simpler: just one prefix that has no implications about what the
named-thing in the second place is. Assuming that W3C wanted to make
a "web" URI scheme (just a joke, of course):
open-w3c-web:foo
free-w3c-web:foo
a-w3c-web:foo
by-w3c-web:foo
tag-w3c-web:foo
ext-w3c-web:foo <<<=== My Favorite ("External/Extension URIs")
user-w3c-web:foo
Finally, one could drop the prefix entirely, saying any scheme with a
dash in it is a non-IETF one, and the first segment should be the
IETF-approved name of an organization controlling the rest of it.
-- sandro
Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2003 15:02:30 UTC