Re: New question: distinguished status of http:?

At 11:17 AM 19/02/02 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>Does TAG consider that the HTTP: scheme has a distinguished status among URI schemes?  For example, a dereferencable URI might be FTP: or LDAP: or a scheme indic

The HTTP scheme clearly has a special status in the hearts & 
minds of the population of both users and programers; it also
hugely dominates the existing deployed population of URIs worldwide.

Given that, what?  We seem to have consensus that it's just fine
to use URIs as names, and for XML namespaces that it's desirable
to use the names in retrieving definitive material.  Where people
want to use a URI to retrieve something they virtually always
begin it with "http:..."

I can see room for worry that a predisposition towards "http:"
URIs might close off innovation in the future; the architecture
certainly does support other schemes even if the world doesn't
[for the moment] seem very interested in them.  Is the take-away
that we should have some examples of namespace names that don't
begin with "http:" URIs but are nonetheless retrievable?  Using
"ftp:" for this seems wilfully perverse and "ldap:" will produce
a lot of puzzled expressions. -Tim

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2002 22:57:14 UTC