Re: The importance of PUBLIC (response to NOTATIONS and DATA TYPES)

Rivers-Moore, Daniel wrote:

>         But if the web is your only target, URLs are all you need.
>         </danconnolly>
> 
>         Strange. I seem to remember I once clicked on a hotspot on an
> HTML page and found that the link was broken!

Such things do happen. But consider that even in that case,
you have as much information as an FPI gives you: you have
an identifier in a global context.

> I would argue that it is
> precisely _because_ public identifiers cannot be fully resolved by the
> system that they are so important.

I don't follow you. How does this make them important and/or
useful? Could you give me pointers to this discussion
you referred to?

> This means there must be
> redundancy _and_ recourse to something beyond the system. This is
> precisely what PUBLIC provides.

I agree that redundancy helps when things break. But what
recourse do FPIs provide that URLs don't? If you mean
the ISO owner registry, how is that better/different from
the DNS domain registry? If you can't access it, it's equally
useless, no? Unless you've seen the owner string before.
And I'll bet the odds are higher that the DNS domain owner
string is in your cache than that the ISO FPI string is
in your cache, because URLs are used for all sorts of
things and FPIs are only used for SGML stuff.

-- 
Dan Connolly, Architecture Domain Lead
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 12 June 1997 10:25:26 UTC