Re: uri-comp draft necessary?

Very tentative suggestion:

Would it make sense to augment the normative Namespaces rule on 
character-by-character comparison with a health warning:  "NOTE:  although 
namespace identity is determined on a character match basis, users are 
strongly discouraged from intentionally creating distinct namespaces named 
by URIs that would be considered equal per RFC 2396 or other governing 
specifications."  Or some such.

Indeed, this might be generalized to a principle that would apply in any 
similar situation where layered equivalence rules expose the risk of false 
negatives:  you define normative equivalence at the appropriate level, but 
non-normatively discourage use of names that would result in false 
positives per higher-level equivalence rules.

If practical, this might avoid the need to debate how we would provide 
RDDL for the two separate namespaces http://example.com and 
HTTP://example.com, since we've already suggested that the existence of 
one preclude the use of the other.  So, if you really want to play such 
games and create both, go ahead, but don't ask us why the rest of the 
architecture doesn't do everything you want after you've ignored our 
advice.

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Wednesday, 18 December 2002 21:06:52 UTC