RE: URI registries and schemes

Mike Schinkel writes:

> Similar, but not exactly the same. Google doesn't own the 
> physical world, but Linden Labs owns the virtual world in 
> Second Life.  So similar, but different.

I'd put it a bit differently.  Google has registered google.com, and 
Linden Research has registered slurl.com.  That gives each of them the 
right to associate resources with http-scheme URIs for those domains, 
respectively.  So, if Google says that all URIs conforming to the template 
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=<lat>,<long> refer to the corresponding 
places on the physical earth, then they do.  If Google says that they 
refer to a set of Google map documents that happen to depict those places 
on the earth, then that's what they identify.  I suspect that for Google, 
it's the latter (to the extent they've been careful in documenting one or 
the other.)  The URIs don't really directly identify the place:  they 
identify Google maps of the places.

Slurl.com says that URLs of the form 
http://slurl.com/secondlife/<region>/<x-coordinate>/<y-coordinate>/<z-coordinate>/ 
"provides direct teleport links to locations in Second Life".  That's a 
bit informal, but it suggests to me that these links are documented by the 
responsible authority as referring not to a page or a document, but to a 
position in Second Life.  So, I think that's the difference.

BTW: there's a closely related discussion on the TAG mailing list which 
has to do with a related question: there's no question that if your URI 
identifies a document such as a map, an HTTP status code 200 is 
appropriate -- the question is, if your URI identifies something else, 
like a physical place or a person, is 200 still appropriate.  The TAG 
decided some time ago that the answer is "no", but the ramifications are 
still being (hotly) debated.  I strongly suggest we not run that debate in 
parallel here, but if you're interested (and have a few days free), you 
might want to go back through the archives of www-tag@w3.org.  Thanks!

Noah

[1] http://slurl.com/about.php

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Monday, 17 December 2007 19:10:56 UTC