- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 15:19:45 -0700
- To: Paul Cotton <pcotton@microsoft.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>, LMM@acm.org, roy.fielding@day.com
Paul Cotton wrote:
> Given the above two statements I have a couple of questions:
>
> Q1: Do you consider these two statements to be in conflict with each
> other e.g. would you prefer that the Namespaces 1.1 specification be
> changed to discourage the use of URNs?
Yes and yes, but I believe this might be difficult to achieve. The TAG
seems to be quite broadly unenthusiastic about URNs but they have
enthusiastic partisans in the community.
> Q2: Your text "URNs are not effectively usable" might lead me to believe
> that there might be an effort ongoing to standardize how to retrieve
> resources using URNs. Do you know of such an effort?
Yes, there are such efforts in the IETF; the acronym doesn't spring to
mind, but that doesn't matter, because I'm sure that several other
people will spring forward to explain why URNs are in fact retrievable
and that TimBL and I are blowing smoke when we claim they're not. I
accept that mechanisms in principle exist to dereference URNs, it's just
that I've never used a computer where such software was installed, so
it's clearly far from ubiquitous.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2003 18:19:51 UTC