- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 10:32:24 -0700
- To: <www-tag@w3.org>
I stick by my original advice on this topic (in Roy's issue list): When we update RFC 2396, I suggest we add an introductory paragraph explaining that the term "URI" is used ambiguously in the community to mean "a URI reference" (corresponding to the URI-reference BNF entity) or "an absolute URI", and that for this reason, the term "URI" itself is not defined in the document. I'd probably fix the Abstract correspondingly, e.g., "Informally, a Uniform Resource Identifier is a compact string...." so that people don't think that the abstract is normative. and extend the advice to the TAG: it's devilishly hard to take a term which is in widespread use for a number of different concepts and restrict it to mean only one of them. (Even if you're the person who made up the term in the first place.) I think "redefining the term URI to mean something precise" is one of those "boiling the ocean" tasks: lots of energy and it won't work anyway. Why waste energy on this? If you need a technically precise term, use something whose meaning hasn't been blurred (e.g., 'anyURI' in the XML schema spec means something precise). Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Sunday, 8 September 2002 20:34:43 UTC