Re: B.9 Formal system, public identifiers?

At 16:27 15/10/96 -0400, David Durand wrote:

> If we specify FSI syntax, and
>then restrict the FSIs to be URLs, there is a nice path to more-robust
>identifiers at no more cost than we incur by implementing URLs to
>begin with.

There is a cost to the user: instead of entering a kind of thing they are
familiar with, namely a URL, they have to enter something that they are not
familiar with, namely an FSI.

If we stick to URLs now, we can still support FSIs in the future: any FSI
must include < and > but these two characters are not allowed in URLs.  It's
ridiculous to force users to type <url> at the beginning of all their URLs
when it's completely unnecessary to do so.

>    But making it impossible to ever do the right thing and use
>location independent naming seems a high price to bear.

URL syntax is extensible: why can't it be used to do location-independent
naming? Something like fpi://W3C/DTD/HTML_3.2 is a perfectly good URL.  I
can't resolve it, but then I can't resolve FPIs either.

Location-independent naming is not a problem specific to XML.  We should use
whatever general solution gets adopted for the WWW, rather than trying to
come up with a solution specifically for XML.

James

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 1996 17:46:40 UTC