Re: XBL Namespace uses the data: scheme

* noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:
>These comments appear separately in your note, but they seem related. 
>FWIW, I don't believe that such URIs are intended primarily for use by 
>people, though some attention is paid to giving them orderly structure and 
>making the segments of the hierarchy comprehensible.  Indeed, I've heard 
>it asserted that of the URIs for which W3C is the authority, only 
>www.w3.org and perhaps a few others are assigned with ease of recall by 
>people and ease of typing as a primary goal.

  "We do not want people to memorize URIs. We want them to create
  bookmarks, to use our navigation tools, and to use our search
  tools." -- Ian B. Jacobs

>My assumption is that the TAG's assignment pattern for its documents,
>which predates my tenure and is consistent with the W3C's overall policy,
>is aimed primarily for convenience of the assignment authority, I.e. for
>providing an orderly means of generating unique identifiers that are
>stable over a long period of time.  Yes, there are ways to do that while
>being even more obscure, but my assumption is that to the extent that
>words like "tag" are recorded in human-consumable form, that's a "nice
>to have" not a primary goal.

So we know W3C is mostly concerned with its own convenience and
spoon-feeding its tools and services to its users; when I assign
resource locators, my primary concern is what is best for my users,
enabling them to use the tools and methods to access and link my
resources that work best for them.

>Mostly documents like this finding are accessed through hyperlinks, IMO. 

I make most hyperlinks indirectly through citing locators on news-
groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, etc. I do cite locators I re-
member. I don't click my way through some unusable web site like
W3C's to come up with the locator after a minute or two. With no
"hyperlinks" to them, documents are mostly unaccessed.

>Is that not making correct use of RFC 2119's MUST NOT?

TAG findings are not normative documents and do not specify con-
formance; the keywords are to specify requirement levels. The
concept of having requirements in non-normative documents that
cannot be complied with does not make sense to me. The specific
use of "MUST NOT" is highly suspicious, it's entirely unclear
from the text how interoperability is at stake, or which harm
is done by ignoring it.
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Received on Friday, 30 June 2006 22:09:45 UTC