- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 02:16:12 +0100
- To: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
- CC: www-tag@w3.org
On Tuesday, 19 March, 2002, 01:43:09, Paul wrote: PP> From my point of view, PP> the Web has one fundamental universal feature and that is the URI. The PP> question that faces us, in my opinion, is whether there should be PP> alternate addresing models. For instance if I go to XMethods, I note PP> that every web service there has its own addressing model. PP> The ATM location database accepts zip codes and produces ATM locations. PP> None of its ATM locations are universally addressable because they don't PP> have URIs. Okay, but with a flourish I can produce the URI zip://atm.example.org/06902 or, worse, zip:06902 but just because these now have URIs does not lessen in any way their proprietary nature, and the second one is probably not dereferencable either. PP> Kazoo accepts phone numbers and produces XML person records. None of its PP> person records are universally addressable because they don't have URIs. PP> GeoPinpoint accepts IP addresses and returns locations. None of its PP> results are ... Ditto for those. tel:+1-555-123-4567 and geoip:127.0.0.1 (just to add an edge case). PP> Now can anyone make a case that these applications are richer or better PP> because they invented proprietary address spaces? Under what PP> circumstances is a proprietary address space an advantage? Its hard to justify, I agree. It doesn't get easier to justify by giving them URIs, though. To really help, they have to be dereferencable, otherwise they are mere syntactic fluff. Although I agree that anonymous resources without URIs are a problem, particularly for linking to them or into them. The results of client-side XSL-T processing are a case in point. -- Chris mailto:chris@w3.org
Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 20:18:02 UTC