- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 22:14:49 -0800
- To: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
> Since the http: URI scheme uses the DNS as an authority system, it also > inherits its capacity to delegate authority. And AFAIK, DNS can't > delegate, meaning that "www.publicwebhosting.com" and > "mary.publicwebhosting.com" identify the same authority, and that > authority is the entity (person/company) you see when you do a "whois" > on "publicwebhosting.com". > > It may be the case that Mary has to pay that entity for > "mary.publicwebhosting.com", and in return receives certain rights to > that name. But that isn't the general rule, so shouldn't be a rule for > http: URIs, IMO. > > Today, if Mary wants to be an authority, she needs to fork over money > for her own domain name. True, but in this context, I'm less interested in establishing her provenence with WHOIS (not very machine-readable, in any case) than I am with being able to disambiguate her from bob, joe and all of those Marks. In other words, for the purposes of the URI, 'mary.publicwebhosting.com' and 'bob.publicwebhosting.com' are two different authorities. The fact that there isn't a common way to query who they represent doesn't change that; it's easier to bootstrap with Web tools in any case. In any case, it may be good to avoid making specific recommendations about how to use authorities, while still noting that they have some interesting properties... Cheers,
Received on Friday, 20 December 2002 01:15:05 UTC