- From: Massimo Marchiori <massimo@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 19:43:42 +0200
- To: "Norman Walsh" <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
> | Not in the slightest. It is perfectly OK for software to look at the > | URI scheme and act on that basis, the semantics of URI schemes are > | well-documented. The problem is looking into the opaque part, i.e. > | assuming that http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Biz is a directory, or that > | http://example.com/foo.html yields HTML when dereferenced. Does the > | spec need to be clearer on what's OK and what's not? -Tim > > Yes, if that's what we mean, I think we need to be clearer about what > part of the URI is opaque. What you're saying is that the scheme part > is NOT opaque, but everything else is. Adopting that position begs a > couple of questions: > > - - If the scheme specification explicitly identifies other parts of the URI, > does that make those parts transparent as well? For example, suppose that > mailto: says that the string that follows it is an email address. Does > that mean I can infer that any-damn-fool@nwalsh.com is an email address > if I'm presented with this URI: mailto:any-damn-fool@nwalsh.com ? > > - - Does the HTTP spec constrain the range of HTTP URIs to things that are > documents (or information resources or whatever we're calling bags of bits > the end of a wire these days)? Boy, Norm known how to reopen can of worms... ;) Like anything in the TAG work, the problem is to what level of detail (-> mathematical formalization) you want to go. Keeping the usual tag compromise-style so far, I'd say Tim answer is well sufficient, and so the answer to the first question is "yes", and I would rephrase the second one to the same kind of question (do you note the change of wording between the first and second q's...? ;) to: Does that mean I can infer that http://any-damn-fool-thing-here is an information resource? To which I would again answer: yes. Going deeper into this open more the can of worms, forcing you to a more elaborate formalization and nitpicking. -M
Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 13:45:19 UTC