- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@yahoo-inc.com>
- Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:39:18 -0800
- To: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
- Cc: "Stuart Williams" <skw@hp.com>, www-tag@w3.org
On 2006/02/24, at 6:28 PM, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote: >> >> [nit] I'd rephrase this slightly to reflect that URIs *always* encode >> metadata for private purposes (e.g., where to find the file / what >> code to dispatch to). > > I think that's a bit strong. Consider a uuid: scheme URI. I would > say > that it encodes metadata for private purpose only in the sense that > you > can tell the scheme name, and you can do literal equality testing > to see > whether two strings are the same URI. Except in that rather sterile > sense, I claim it encodes no "metadata for private purposes" (You > could in > many cases crack the UUID to get a MAC address, but for practical > purposes > they are treated as opaque.) So, I think "always" is too strong, and > interestingly so. Ah, good point. I wasn't considering pure identifiers. I do wonder how common they are in practice (despite URNs ;) >> I think that it's just as important to make this point (i.e., on >> equal standing with those you put forth): "Authorities MAY >> communicate information about the structure of their URIs (in other >> words, instructions of how to extract metadata from them) for use by >> observers." >> >> Doing so is very useful and common, and people reading the opacity >> documentation often conflate it with unhinted inference (which *is* >> bad). > > I agree, though with the caveat that any consuming software the > depends on > knowledge of such structure is likely to be less general than software > that either treats URIs as opaque, or that extracts only metadata > covered > by very widely deployed specs (e.g. extracting the scheme or hiearchy > based on RFC 3986). Yes. However, people are getting interested in Web description[1], content labels[2], and site metadata[3], all of which may provide a means for generic software to infer site- and resource-specific (as opposed to scheme-specific) metadata from URIs. Cheers, 1. http://esw.w3.org/topic/WebDescription 2. http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/wcl/ 3. http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#siteData-36 -- Mark Nottingham mnot@yahoo-inc.com
Received on Monday, 27 March 2006 21:40:11 UTC