Return of the undead debate! (was Re: The importance of PUBLIC)

At 9:19 AM -0500 6/12/97, Dan Connolly wrote:
>> 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?

There is about a month of discussion in the back archives of this list --
it echoes, point-for-point, about 4 years of the URN discussion. We decided
to allow PUBLIC, and need not revisit that. I don't remember whether we
will link to FPIs via URN syntax or to URNs vi FPI syntax -- but it doesn't
matter, which way we do it, either way we will be using the relevant ISO
and Internet standards to create a feature some will not happily live
without.

>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.

Just for yucks, I'll note that the URN/FPI registries can be independent of
software, and many will be. Domain names may be potentially so, but in
practice, an expired or reassigned domain name's old organizational binding
is not readily accessible.

But this is not important, we already had _all of these discussions_. Read
the archives if you care, and much joy to you in the reading.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Thursday, 12 June 1997 13:32:11 UTC