- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:51:22 -0400
- To: <pepper@ontopia.net>
- Cc: "'Stan James'" <sjames@uni-osnabrueck.de>, uri@w3.org
Steve Pepper writes: > One important consideration (if this really *is* to be an open > standard) is that your users should be able to figure out which > "subject" (web page, stock, product, service, etc.) the URI is > intended to denote, without necessarily having to use your service. > In other words: given an URI used as an "identifier" for an > arbitrary subject, it should be easy to discover what that subject is. Well, I think you're being a bit quick in suggesting that as a design point. In fact, there's a lot of emphasis on the Web on the opacity of URIs. See [1] for an early exposition of this principle by Tim Berners-Lee, and "The Architecture of the World Wide Web" [2] for another explanation. Indeed, the TAG is has nearly wrapped up publication of a finding devoted entirely to what you should or should not infer about a resource from inspection of its URI. The draft finding is The Use of Metadata in URIs [3]. I suggest that those interested in the suggestion above consult all of these resources, as this is a topic that's been carefully considered as the Web has evolved. Also, I strongly concur with Mark Baker's suggestion to use http-scheme URIs to solve the problem that is the subject of this thread. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#opaque [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-opacity [3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2006 12:51:44 UTC