RE: Proposed disposition of Stuart Williams' comments on Metadata in URI 31

By "scheme-type information" I mean the type of information we can
recognize in a URI based on its scheme. Examples might include:

 - which protocol to use (like ftp)
 - allowed and disallowed characters (like IRIs - I think) 
 - meaning of positional query string parameters (like ldap attributes,
scope, and filter)
 - whether or not it is intended as a persistent identifier (like urn)
 - whether or not it is even dereferencable (like urn)
 - whether or not to use SSL (like https)
 - on-click behavior (like mailto - bring up a mailer)
 - scheme-specific normalization and comparison rules

Marty.Schleiff@boeing.com; CISSP
Associate Technical Fellow - Cyber Identity Specialist
Computing Security Infrastructure
(206) 679-5933

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 5:28 PM
To: Schleiff, Marty
Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Proposed disposition of Stuart Williams' comments on
Metadata in URI 31

On 9/18/06, Schleiff, Marty <marty.schleiff@boeing.com> wrote:
>  While I think this idea might be a
> start, it doesn't go far enough. It doesn't answer the following:
>
> 1) It relies too much on tribal knowledge. How's an application 
> supposed to know that "<newSchemeOrganization>.org" is intended to 
> convey scheme-type information, while "<otherOrganization>.org" does 
> not convey scheme-type information?

I'm not sure what you mean by "scheme-type information", but I'd say
that a wide variety of information can be learned by dereferencing the
identifier.

A problem with assigning semantics to the names themselves, is that
semantics change over time, whereas names shouldn't.

> 4) TAG members frequently justify the use of a single scheme by 
> claiming it's expensive to introduce new schemes, and difficult for 
> applications to be taught how to process new schemes. I claim it would

> be just as expensive and difficult to teach applications how to 
> recognize the various URI characteristics and semantics with a 
> "<newSchemeOrganization>.spec" approach, and more expensive with a 
> nebulous "<newSchemeOrganization>.org" approach, and even more 
> expensive with no approach at all.

I believe that managing it using the data returned from dereferencing
URIs would be less expensive than all of those options.

Cheers,

Mark.

Received on Thursday, 28 September 2006 00:47:59 UTC