Re: The Neo-Classical View of URI Classification

> These two variants appear to have co-existed from early on in the
> history of the internet, if not from the very beginning. Some may

You should say "the history of the Web" instead of "the history of 
the Internet" (Internet and Web should both be capitalized here 
because they're being used as proper names); the history of the 
Internet goes back 20 years before Tim Berners-Lee's first paper 
proposing the creation of the Web.  The Internet started as the 
ARPAnet in 1969, and the term "Internet" was in common use (among 
academic communities at least) by the mid 1980s, well before URIs of 
any form existed.

>   Digital        |  Non-Digital
>                  |
>  <--URL--------> |
>                  |
>  <--URN------------------------->
>                  |
>                  |<--URP-------->

But since URPs are supposed to be non-digital, where does that place 
the "data:" scheme, which in fact consists of digital data -- not 
"resolved" to a digital resource, because the data is contained 
directly within the URI (so you're correct in classifying that scheme 
as a URP because it's effectively a constant rather than an address), 
but it's still data of a digital form (and can hence be used in 
contexts such as the IMG tag that expect digital data).

This makes "data:" of a different nature than other URIs that are 
intended to denote a non-digital thing "in the real world" (e.g., a 
dog, or a can of beans).  Those URIs would be meaningless to place 
within an IMG tag, as they don't represent a *digital picture* of a 
dog or a can of beans, but rather the objects themselves.

Maybe you need still more UR* acronyms to make this significant 
distinction?

-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Web Tips: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/
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Received on Friday, 25 January 2002 08:33:20 UTC