- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 22:45:54 -0400
- To: "Fernando Franco" <avoid.spam.account@gmail.com>
- Cc: "W3C-TAG" <www-tag@w3.org>
Fernando Franco: > URIs are names. > Names are not hierarchical. > Ergo, URIs should not be hierarchical. Well, I respectfully disagree. In the real world, many names are hierarchical. For example, my own name reflects a grouping by family (Mendelsohn) within which I have a given name (Noah). I strongly suspect that the files on your computer have hierarchical names. Sometimes such hierarchies are used in part to facilitate location of the resource, but in other cases merely to facilitate management of the names (my name doesn't do much to help you find me). In any case, URIs are designed in part to make it easy to integrate into the web existing as well as new information in computer systems. The hierarchical structure available for URI facilitates the mapping of existing hierarchical names, as well as the assignment of new ones. Not all names are or need be hierarchical, but experience with systems such as DCE/COM/OLE that use GUIDs or UUIDs has shown that opaque monolithic names have disadvantages as well as advantages in terms of convenience, etc. Also, in practice, even GUIDs and UUIDs exhibit structure internally that has degree of hierarchy (blocks of names are handed out in chunks, and several bits are reserved for sub-assignment within the chunks.) Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Monday, 28 August 2006 02:46:10 UTC