- From: Michael Mealling <michael@neonym.net>
- Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 10:49:22 -0400
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 07:36:37AM -0700, Tim Bray wrote: > Michael Mealling wrote: > >Depending on the application, dereferenceability is not required and > >URNs make the most sense out of anything out there. There's a reason > >Microsoft put them all over their Office suite. > > That's a realy terrible example. Those office URNs are a disaster, and > I suspect that Microsoft did this partly to avoid documenting their > kludgy proprietary file formats. The world would be an immensely > better place if those were real URLs with real documentation at the end > of them. But it would also be one that would simply quit working when the network connection went down. As someone else suggested: you're assuming web applications and XML and URIs get used in awfully unconnected places. > >But the TAG should also realize that there are many > >cases where dereferenability of namespace names is exactly _NOT_ what the > >system being designed wants to happen. > > The only plausible example of this that I've seen is that of > highly-transient per-transaction namespaces that exist only briefly. > Can you think of any others? Yes. The IETF has made very specific decisions not to turn the IANA's web resources into a directly downloadable schema repository. That's why we created the 'ietf' URN namespace and are putting permanent references to IANA registry entries there instead of making 'iana.org' follow the w3.org example. We _don't_ want things failing becuase the IANA decided to re-arrange its website. That's called a single point of failure and its _not_ what the Internet is supposed to have. > At the moment, my belief is that someone > who wants to use a namespace, but doesn't want to let people find out > about it using the Web, is either nefarious or incompetent. That's the > motivation for the SHOULD. -Tim Thanks. I'll tell the MPEG and ISBN associations that you think they're nefarious or incomptent.... So far the TAG's cognitive process isn't giving me warm fuzzies about its output.... -MM -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Mealling | Vote Libertarian! | urn:pin:1 michael@neonym.net | | http://www.neonym.net
Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 10:51:08 UTC