Re: "resolution mechanism"

> > From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
> > 
> > ...turning a non-derferencerable URI into a dereferencerable one is incredibly
> > difficult.

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> 
> Why?

Okay, here's a non-derferencerable URI:

foo://322123683729405239

Now to turn this into a URI that you can dereference on YOUR computer, I
would have to give you some software that knows how to interpret it as a
derferencerable address. Of course the software would be totally
different if you were using the .NET Platform versus the JVM versus
straight Windows.

Now on the other hand, I can give you this address which is today a 404:

http://www.prescod.net/322123683729405239

Next week I can turn it into a dereferencable URI just by putting a file
on a web server. You already have the software that can dereference it
installed. Every XSLT, XML Schema, HTML, XInclude etc. implementation
already knows how to deal with it.

Beyond the issue of already deployed software there is the issue of ease
of maintenance of infrastructure. A URI that builds upon the DNS/IP
naming system is demonstrably easier to deploy:

foo://www.prescod.net/322123683729405239

translates into something like:

CONNECT www.prescod.net
FETCH 322123683729405239

It's more complicated to do the same for location-independent URIs like
the first one.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Sunday, 14 April 2002 16:09:54 UTC