Re: BIND spec: Potential URI comparison issue

Ted Hardie wrote:
> I'm not sure I see why this a feature.  Having a single, well-specified 
> mechanism
> that allows you to create identifiers that have a high probability of 
> being unique
> across space and time seems like goodness for this use.  Why would you 
> want to allow
> *any* URI scheme here?  mailto: julian.reschke+mylock@gmx.de? 
> gopher://gopher.umd.edu/my_lock?
> 
> For both the xml namespace 1.0 and 1.1 recommendations, going down that
> path has meant dealing with the difference between two references being
> identical and "resolving to the same thing".  The spin-cycle on that 
> argument
> could wring out the garments of every parliament ever sat.

I personally don't think it's a problem. It has worked well for XMLNS 
(in practice!) and for WebDAV lock tokens.

In this specfic case, there's also the fact that many document 
management systems *already* assign unique identifiers, and allowing any 
kind of URI in many cases enables systems to just re-use the IDs they 
already have.

Requiring a single schema would also mean that this working group needs 
to define which. I really don't want to open *that* can of worms.

To summarize: this is an interesting discussion. In many previous cases, 
the result was to allow any URI and to use string comparision. Right 
now, Atom (lots of visibility) is using the same approach. I don't think 
it would be a good idea to start the same thread all over again here.

Julian

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Received on Tuesday, 21 September 2004 07:25:16 UTC