Re: Mailto misnamed not misdesigned (Was: Hyperlinks depend on GET (was: Re: REST and the Web))

Summary:  Correction -- RealAudio does use URIs.

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Paul Prescod wrote:
> Fine, but that doesn't imply they need to be part of the URI space. IMO,
> the URI space is for addressing the information space! Things that use
> protocols that do not support GET can be referenced through non-URI
> mechanisms. That's already what RealAudio does (for example). They need
> to do that because of the difficulty of deploying new URI types, but it
> is also a good idea because it makes it easy to associate metadata with
> the resource.

RealSystem (which includes RealAudio) does use URIs, and has since 1995.
Our original proprietary protocol uses "pnm://example.com/audio.ra" URLs,
which we generally included in plain text metafiles (getable via HTTP).

We've since moved on to use RTSP (RFC 2326) which defines the use of
"rtsp://..." URLs.  RTSP supports some REST-ish concepts, but I don't know
the REST paper well enough to know just how well it maps.

Having URLs was very important to making SMIL work.  Typical SMIL files
mingle RTSP and HTTP sources interchangably.  Additionally, browsers now
typically support protocol handlers, and we take advantage of that (at
least on IE...for which RTSP URLs will use our player, or the Quicktime
player [I think], depending on how it's registered).

Rob

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2002 18:33:17 UTC