RE: URIs / URLs

Some types of resources on the Web are volatile by nature. John Doe puts up
a personal web page. Three weeks later, he decides he doesn't really want a
personal Web page - too much trouble to update it - and deletes it.

It seems to me that there are some resources that *should* be persistent,
others that have no need to be. Has anyone given any thought to how to
distinguish the two? Should RDF mark persistent documents as such? Should
anything not so marked be presumed to be volatile? Are there different
degrees of persistence (e.g., a page that is persistent while some of the
data on the page changes, or a page that represents the latest version of a
document - but always that document).

What about the way in which these documents are referenced. Would it be
better to have both permanent and temporary links? Could links be set to
expire? Could documents include an expire date and links to that document
automatically expire when the document did?

My brain hurts.

Charles F. Munat
Seattle, Washington

Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 17:25:13 UTC