The case against URNs

Champion, Mike wrote:
>
>...
> All findings and Recommendations need to be reconsiderable if the TAG is to
> succeed in its architectural mission.  Micah's proposal (apparently
> referencing some F2F discussion) to resolve the abstract URI dilemma seems
> very sensible to me:  There is a new scheme (or perhaps two) for resources
> that are either abstract and don't exist anywhere such as namespace names,
> and for the proverbial "car" that physically exists but can't be accessed in
> a meaningful way via the Web.  

The point of view that Micah expresses is very common. I've made more or 
less the "now:" proposal on a variety of occasions, to the point of 
starting to register a URN namespace.

  http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=2166776&list=318

But I was wrong. People like Tim B-L, Roy and Mark Baker argued me out 
of it.

So I stumble upon one of these URIs and I would like to know:

  * what type of thing is this?
  * what is its current state?

How do I answer those questions? What you and Micah (and countless 
thousands before you) are arguing is that even though the creator of the 
URI knows the answer to at least one of those questions, and they COULD 
answer the question by putting up a little snippet of HTML and RDF 
accessible through the URI, they SHOULD NOT because it would be 
confusing to people.

Or to put it another way, resources with fewer operations (i.e. 
resources that are less functional) are better than resources with one 
potentially confusing operation (i.e. more functional). It sounds a 
little Orwellian: weaker is stronger! Sometimes weakness along one 
vector does improve strength along another, but we're making a 
technology socially more acceptable by reducing its technical 
functionality and that is probably not a good trade-off in the long run.

(there is a chance that you meant that the "now" URIs be always 
constructed such that they can be turned into "http" URIs by fiddling 
with the syntax in which case I'd say that they really are 
dereferencable URIs and your proposal sounds different than Micah's)

  Paul Prescod

Received on Sunday, 6 October 2002 18:30:55 UTC