- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 12 Jul 2002 12:44:06 -0500
- To: Michael Mealling <michael@neonym.net>
- Cc: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>, www-tag@w3.org
On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 09:49, Michael Mealling wrote: [...] > > >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. I'm interested in records of those decisions. I told the TAG I'd ask you for them... "Section 1.1.1 Social expectations for URI persistence [...] Action DC: Ask Michael Mealing when IETF decided not to use HTTP URis to name protocols." -- http://www.w3.org/2002/07/08-tag-summary#arch-doc If the decision entails not using http: URIs for IANA things, then I disagree with it. I consider myself a member, i.e. a participant, in the IETF, and I'm disappointment that the consensus process seems to have failed. I'm interested to know what sort of last calls and such I should have been paying attention to in order to voice my disagrement before the decision was made. > 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. Using HTTP does not introduce a single point of failure. The IETF is trusted to manage the names whether they look like http://www.ietf.org/... or urn:ietf:... There's no technology that can prevent the IETF from re-assigning a urn: ; only policies and other social mechanisms. I suggest that there's more reason to trust the IETF to manage the http: names, because more people are likely to notice and hold them accountable if they screw them up. The answer to "things failing because the IANA decided to re-arrange its website" is: don't do that. In fact, promise not to do it... in an standards-track RFC, if that's the sort of guarantee you trust. You don't have to promise to keep your web site running forever, since, as you said, the relevant technologies don't depend on availability of servers to dereference the URIs; you just have to promise not to use those names for anything else. As to the lack of a guarantee that IANA/IETF actually owns iana.org/ietf.org, that seems at least as manageable as any of the other relevant risks. i.e. as long as the world cares about IANA, they'll keep following the existing links to iana.org, and as long as IANA cares about the world, they'll continue to service those links. I don't see any guarantee that the same sorts of trademark disputes that cause friction in DNS space won't cause friction in URN NID space. When zillions of dollars are at stake, McDonald's is not going to let a few RFCs stop them from undoing a registration for urn:mcdonalds:bigmac by some unauthorized party. As explained by Prescod in his reply of 02 Jul 2002 08:58:09 -0700, the names http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema have all the characteristics of persistence, uniqueness, and unambiguity of urn:ietf:... names, but as a special bonus aside, if you happen to find to find <xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform> ... in a document, and you've never heard of XSLT, you can pop that URI into any of millions of installed web browsers and find out all about XSLT. | http://www.neonym.net -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 13:43:17 UTC