- From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:48:21 -0700
- To: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, www-tag@w3.org
Norman Walsh wrote: > ... Or to put it another way, you can do > | something with this: > | > | SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" > | > | that you _cannot_ do with this: > | > | PUBLIC "urn:uuid:89793274983729473298473928" > | > | To me, that IS a difference and a significant one. > > Uhm. What exactly can you do with the former that you can't do with > the latter? Given only the two strings, a modern operating environment and no more information, you can dereference one for research purposes and cannot the other. In order to dereference the second one you either need extra information (e.g. a catalog) or rarely-available software (e.g. a URN-aware distributed naming service). The rarely available software would just retrieve the missing information for you... If you want to be simplistic, you could rephrase this as: you can "click on" the first one and it will probably return you useful information. The latter is quite unlikely to. From a programmer's point of view it is like associating the documentation with the code through a link. But the "code" happens to be an identifier and the "documentation" happens to be a web page. I've seen some URN schemes proposed that allow URNs to embed HTTP URIs and I think that they represent a reasonable compromise. Paul Prescod
Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2003 15:48:30 UTC