Re: [metaDataInURI-31]: Initial draft finding for public review/comment.

MDaconta@aol.com wrote:
> ...
> The "Don't peek inside" position stresses the use of identification as 
> an assertion of
> uniqueness and possibly a mechanism to locate that unique thing.  In 
> essence,
> an opaque "pointer".  While those are necessary functions of a URI,
> imbuing an identifier with additional metadata should be
> encouraged.  First, additional metadata in a URI makes it
> easier to keep the URI "cool" (as in 
> http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html) by
> adding classification metadata to the identifier (as with the W3C URLs 
> in your
> finding).

I disagree. The more semantic information is in a URI, and the more 
clients depend upon that semantic information, the harder it is for you 
to change the URI when the metadata changes. e.g.

http://foo/document_about_URLs_by_Paul.html

What happens when Mike takes over editing? Or the document changes to be 
about URLs, not just URIs? Or XML, not HTML?

> Second, additional metadata in a URI enables a higher-level
> of efficient processing on resources by applications that *just* want
> to process URIs.  Opaque URIs would eliminate that increasing possibility.

That's true, but you're trying to use the URI to do two different jobs 
at once (identify and carry metadata). You could instead invent a new 
syntax for URIs + metadata. The URI part would be the true identifier 
and would be very persistent. The metadata part would change as the 
resource evolved.

  Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 9 July 2003 11:21:07 UTC