Re: ERB Decisions of March 26th

At 11:57 PM -0500 3/26/97, lee@sq.com wrote:
>David Durand said:
>> At any rate, I think we will need to keep going here, at least to get
>> to the point that we can put an URN in XML and have it be legal.
>
>Early on in the URN development, the idea was that urn: would simply be
>added as a URL scheme.  In other words, wherever a URL was allowed,
>you could put a URN.

The notion that a URN was simply a kind of URL took a long time to kill,
but it died because it's fundamentally not true. the URN prefix can be
treated as a protocol by a parser, but it is semantically distinct and does
not receive the same kind of processing.

>If you adopt this attitude, the only change needed in the XML spec
>would be to remind people of this fact, rhaps by saying URI everywhere
>instead of URL, or whatever is the current politically correct way
>of doing that.

That would be required, but it's not reminding, it's a meaningful distinction.
>
>The difficulty comes if you want to give both a URN _and_ a URL for the
>same thing -- a practice I consider dangerous at best.  But if URNs
>work as well as advertised, tht won't be necessary anyway :-)

I think that it is a useful pragmatic way to address the resolution
problems that are ineveitable, and enable additional semantics-based
caching for smarter clients.

We've had this discussion off-list a couple of times now. People will use
URL backups for PUBLIC IDs properly -- not because they are virtuous, but
because if they don't, their documents won't work. That's the way people
learn how URLs work too.

  -- 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, 27 March 1997 13:38:32 UTC