Re: URL better than FPI

On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Arjun Ray wrote:

> : A _system identifier_ is system-specific information that enables
> : the entity manager of an SGML system to locate the file or the 
> : memory location or the pointer within a file where the entity can be
> : found. [...]  It should also be noted that a system identifier could
> : be an invocation of a program that controls access to an entity that
> : is being identified. [...]
> : A _public identifier_ is a name that is intended to be meaningful 
> : across systems and different user environments. [...]

Intersting.  But because a a little black wire comming out the back of my
computer, a global network is part of my system.  So a URL (URI?) seems to
satify the condisions of both PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. ... But
that's probably not a problem.

None the less, a PUBLIC identifier would be better so systems without a
little wire coming out of them can still use XHTML files.

> > Hmm... well... it doesn't seem that the "+//IDN ..." syntax
> > accomodates URIs that aren't DNS-based; e.g. uuid:23io423oi423oi4
> > or oid:12.424.54.34.23.23.45.24 or even mid:l2k3j42lkj3@foo.com
> > or tel:+1-444-555-1212 or futurescheme:whatever-goes-here .

(comment for Dan)

Sure it doesn't accomodate URIs that are not DNS based, but ours is DNS
based.  (Can't anyone claim ownership of a uuid?, so using it to identify
a valuable document would be silly).  And using mailto: as an identifier
for a document would be silly too.  As noted by Arjun, the file scheme is
a lousy public idenifier.

So only a subset of URIs are even remotely close to appropriate anyway.
Fortunately our is DNS based, so I see no reason not to use it.
 
> > [...] Hmm... in practice, I wonder if it would be easier to get
> > ISO to relax the syntactic constraings on PUBLIC identifiers than
> > to deploy a convention of mapping +//IDN foo.org/... to
> > http://foo.org/... or ftp://foo.org/... or whatever.

Still, why not use a valid FPI that is registered and means exactly what
you want to everybody?
 
-- 
Russell O'Connor                           roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
       <http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~roconnor/>
``Paradoxically, a refusal to `put a monetary value on life' means that
life is often undervalued.'' -- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Received on Monday, 21 February 2000 10:36:15 UTC