Re: now://example.org/car (was lack of consensus on httpRange-14)

>> I think Roy is speaking for the 99% of people who _use_ the
>> web rather than those that write programs that manipulate web tokens.
>
> 99% of people who use the WWW use URLs not URIs. As Simon St. Laurent
> has pointed out in the past, it is opportunistic revisionism to claim
> that people who use the WWW are using URIs and then posit that the
> concept of using locators as identifiers was a wise decision.

Oh, that is such a tired debate.  If you want to persist in your island
of discontent, then go ahead and build a system that is based entirely
on names.  Nothing in the Web protocols prevent such a system from being
built.  Please do so and take along all of the other folks who believe
in this theology of naming, so that you can happily explore your ideas
and the rest of us can focus on the Web that has been deployed.

When I use the term URI, I use it as defined in RFC 2396 and its
future revision.  No other working group or standards body is
normative in regards to URIs.  URLs are a subset of URIs.  URLs
were called URIs until an IETF working group decided that the
artificial distinction would "resolve the issue", which turned
out to be false and the decision was reversed five years ago.
The fact that most people call them URLs, due to the mass
of user documentation produced between 1993-1997 that simply copied
the Mosaic help files, does not change what the standard says.

BTW, anyone who claims that this is opportunistic revisionism
had better have something more than their opinion to back that up.
The discussions on the nature of URIs can be found in the URI WG
and www-talk archives, and if you aren't willing to quote from
those archives then you aren't qualified to be arguing with me
about the nature of URIs.

....Roy

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 15:21:30 UTC