Re: Base

On Thu, 23 Jan 1997 07:47:53 -0500 Tim Bray said:
>At the time I was a robot writer and my robot was looking for help in
>de-duping, i.e. how many slightly-variant mirror copies of the Jargon file
>do you really want to index?  But beyond this narrow interest, I then
>believed, and still do, strongly, that it would be useful for there
>to be a standard way for an object to assert "Here is the canonical
>address which I request to be used in retrieving the object you are now
>reading".  Use in hot-lists and by crawlers being just two obvious
>applications.  I think this would be a highly useful, cheap-to-specify,
>easy-to-implement item to put in XML-LINK.

I half agree and half violently disagree.  Maybe it's just the
wording.

>Any reason not to do this? - Tim

Yeah:  often there *is* no canonical address stuff should be
retrieved by:  if you're on the East Coast get it from the site in
North Carolina; if on the West Coast, from the Petaluma site; if in
Europe, from Oxford; if ...

It seems to me that what one needs for deduping is a unique
identifier:  i.e. an (F)PI or a URN.  Would the problem of deduping
not be solved just by allowing a doc to say 'By the way, this is my
FPI'?

Or have I misunderstood?


Michael
>

Received on Thursday, 23 January 1997 10:29:38 UTC