Re: URIs for media types

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 12:11 -0800, Erik Wilde wrote:
> hello.
> 
> On 2011-03-08 23:58, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> > I agree that for areas such as the Semantic Web, it's worthwhile. I also
> > agree that the effort required may be rather low (for us) if you
> > volunteer to do it.
> 
> i don't think it's in any way specific to the semantic web. in fact, 
> that would be the application area requiring most constraints, because 
> there you would probably want the URIs to resolve (working HTTP URIs), 
> and you'd like to get some RDF, maybe based on SKOS. URI-based 
> identification is relevant for any web-targeted design, and using URIs 
> is just more scalable and robust than creating a separate namespace with 
> its own syntax.
> 
> > I would note that there is currently somewhat less enthusiasm for having
> > such URIs at (potentially) servable/served locations, because of the
> > recurring tough experiences that W3C has had with unintended but
> > clueless DOS attacks on their HTML DTDs. (See e.g.
> > http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic.)
> 
> very good point, and a very good link to illustrate the problem. i'd be 
> perfectly fine to establish non-HTTP URIs to avoid that problem, and the 
> info: URI scheme or others could be chosen to do this. the proposed URIs 
> would not serve the purpose of actionable links (it simply might be 
> helpful if you could paste them into the address bar and actually GET 
> something), they would just be well-defined identifiers in the web's 
> namespace: the URI space.

I think Martin might be overstating the case.  Yes, W3C has sometimes
had challenges hosting pages whose URIs are used by software (especially
before our sysadmins started using HAProxy), but that doesn't mean we
don't want to do it.    Sometimes it's worth it; these days the decision
has to be made on a case-by-case basis.   I suspect we'd be happy to
host media-type URIs, especially if there was some plan for what content
would be usefully served.

(From what I hear elsewhere in this discussion, it looks like there's no
need for W3C to do this, but I wanted to clear up the impression that
hosting this kind of stuff is too dangerous.)

    -- Sandro

Received on Wednesday, 9 March 2011 20:34:54 UTC