RE: non-http uris

> The problem with Erik putting out an experimental geocode schema, in my 
> opinion, is that he may not be the only one with that idea.  Maybe now, or 
> a in a few years someone will come up with a better one.  Perhaps Erik 
> will only allow for 2 dimensional coding and someone will decide that 
> height is important.  Perhaps he'll get the resolution "wrong".  Well, if 
> he'd just made up a namespace or an HTTP URI, anyone else could just make 
> another one.  Once he's started getting people to deploy URIs of the form 
> "geocode:xxxx,yyyy" then for all time that must be the only use of that 
> scheme.  Otherwise, when you come upon a link, you won't know whether it's 
> an "old" one based on his conventions, or a new one.
>  
> > Do you have a current opinion on what would be best, or do you 
> > just think it
> > needs a lot more exploration?
> 
> Well, if at all possible, I'd try to use http-scheme URIs.  Insofar as 
> there's a deep belief that a separate scheme is needed, I would try to go 
> through a very careful process of requirements gathering, community 
> discussion, debate, etc. leading up to an IETF RFC or W3C Recommendation. 
> What I'm very reluctant about is to see a scheme go out for experiemental 
> use until such careful design and debate has happened. There are many 
> aspects of Web architecture with which it is easy to deploy experimental 
> implementations.  Unless I'm missing something, the tradeoffs in 
> experimenting with new schemes are much trickier.

There's a third option here, which is to use something like tag URIs
[1].  Personally, I do recommend using http: URIs, but I also have
sympathy for that "deep belief" that HTTP is not appropriate for
something like this.

But that doesn't mean you need to go through the whole IETF consensus
process to get a new top-level URI scheme.  You can just use tag URIs,
like:
    tag:dret@berkeley.edu,2008:geocode:xxxx,yyyy
or
    tag:geocode.example.org,2008:geocode:xxxx,yyyy

It's a bit longer, but it lets you just go ahead on your own and worry
about convincing the rest of the world later.

Back to HTTP: If you just used http, then the URL could actually work in
people's browsers.  For instance,
    http://geocode.example.org/xxxx,yyyy
could return some very useful/interesting information.

      -- Sandro

[1] http://www.taguri.org/

Received on Monday, 7 January 2008 22:18:22 UTC