RE: URI for abstract concepts (domain, host, origin, site, etc.)

> From: Dan Connolly [mailto:connolly@w3.org]
> Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 7:52 PM

> > How would a client know that this URI isn't for an actual HTTP
> resource without creating "well-known-location" URIs (option #1 in my
> original email)?
> 
> It _is_ for an actual HTTP resource; i.e. something
> described/discussed in a document you can get by HTTP. Since
> documents can describe/discuss anything, they can describe/discuss
> things like origins and such. RDF is particularly suited
> for this purpose, but I can imagine other media types
> might work too... text/html with RDFa is pretty hip
> these days.

In my case, the "resource" is the concept of a host, which is the combination of a domain name, port number, and protocol used on that port. I want to be able to describe this host by saying, "this is how you transform any HTTP URI that belongs to this host to the URI of its metadata". There are plenty of ways to express this statement but so far I don't have a good way to express the subject of this statement - the host.

Of course, I can come up with something like this:

http://abstract.example.net/host/example.com:80:http

And simply include in the protocol that the http://abstract.example.net/host/ prefix is a special case exception. But while such solutions (a URI version of a well-known location) might be acceptable for HTTP servers due to the complexity and cost of deploying changes to the infrastructure (such as a new HTTP method), they are less acceptable for URIs which can be easily extended with nothing more than a couple pages of spec...

It is almost as easy to register a new URI scheme or URN namespace as it is for me to buy and maintain a new domain name. But I think in this case, the reserved domain name is a lot more offensive to web architecture than a new URI scheme or some other URI-based solution.

I am also happy to make this as specific as needed for my super special use case and mint a new host: URI scheme.

EHL

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 03:19:00 UTC