RE: opaque uris and self-describing resources

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> First off, I think stdin, etc, is an excellent example of 
> something which, if it's going to be a URI, should *not* be 
> an http URI.  (For the reasons given earlier, about how 
> software not familiar with this proposed new convention would 
> respond.)  

Just to weigh in since I've been advocating HTTP URLs for other approaches,
I agree with Sandro here that stdin/out/err should probably not be an HTTP
URL because there are a small finite number representing a relatively
well-known concept that would easily be googlable in the case the person
seeing it doesn't understand it.

OTOH, geo locations are a very large set and essentially infinite (if you
consider finer and finer granularity) representing a most-likely unknown
location thus could benefit from an canonical resource accessible via HTTP
instead of forcing the person to go spelunking to find information about the
location.  Further, services reachable via hypermedia traversal could later
be layered on top of the canonical resource which a scheme alone could never
do.

Yes the same could be true with stdin/out/err but I see the costs of
layering them over HTTP to quickly outweigh the benefits, at least IMO.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org 

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2008 21:53:07 UTC