Re: CURIEs: A proposal

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 14:39 +0200, Steven Pemberton wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 01:10:38 +0200, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:
> >> 	CURIEs are a way of abbreviating URIs.
> >
> > Not as far as I can tell. From what I can tell, CURIEs
> > are a collection of ways of abbreviating URIs. At
> > least, that's what's proposed in
> >  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006Jun/0007.html
> 
> I think that depends on your point of view, and is not really an essential  
> distinction.

It's essential to my understanding.

I'd like to get a clear answer to whether one could write one piece
of software that implements CURIEs. With URI references, it's
clear that one can. But if CURIEs are a cross-language thing,
where each language specifies how to parse and handle them, then
they're not something one could implement concretely, once and for all.

>  Are URIs a method of assigning a name to a resource, or a  
> collection of methods? Depends on whether you look at the syntax of a URI  
> or what happens when the URI is dereferenced.

Right; you can implement the generic URI syntax once and for all,
but as new URI schemes come online, you have to stay tuned to the IANA
registry and add more code.

> Misha's proposal is at the moment just that: a proposal;

Is there something else I should be looking at?

>  I have some  
> sympathy for the ability to define separate methods for concatenating the  
> prefix and suffix of a CURIE (the XHTML namespace, like so many, doesn't  
> end in a slash or a hash, and so using QNames I would have to learn to  
> live with http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtmlindex for the 'index' rel rather  
> than http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/index or  
> http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml#index), however, I currently prefer the  
> simplicity of just using concatenation.
> 
> Steven
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 27 June 2006 12:52:45 UTC