Re: URIs for the standard output and input streams

> The problem is URIs are supposed to be UNIFORM Resource Identifiers.

Yes, but there are two different type of resource, informational and
non-informational. STDIN is a generic concept and would fall squarly
into the non-information resource category. As such, it is perfectly
OK to use one identifier to describe /all/ STDINs.

That identifier could be "STDIN", "QWERTYUIOP", "CN0145" or
"http://example.com/stdin" - it really doesn't matter. A rose by any
other name...

... given that any name will do, you may as well choose a name that
you can "follow with your nose" and GET some description of the
resource. HTTP works perfectly for this.

There is no instance were you can GET (in HTTP semantics) "a" STDIN or
"the" STDIN. It is not a normal (information) resource like a web
page. If you GET http://example.com/posix/stdin and you receive an RDF
graph with a POSIX onology describing what STDIN /means/ then this is
a major win.

Saying that "std:in" looks nicer is not an objective technical
argument and you would have, I am guessing, a hard time convinving
IANA to register such a scheme.

> I suspect the suggestion to use the file URI scheme might really be
> the correct one. In fact, it might already work on Unix.

No, this would not work.

-- 
Noah Slater <http://bytesexual.org/>

"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as
society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman

Received on Tuesday, 15 January 2008 16:29:03 UTC