- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:27:05 +0100
- To: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
- Cc: "Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)" <dbooth@hp.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mark Baker writes: > If you're trying to extend the Web in a way that requires providing > license to agents to extract information from URIs - which appears to > be a key part of the functionality XRIs are trying to provide (see > 1.1.1 of xri-syntax) - then you need a new URI scheme. I want to be sure I'm not mistaken to focus on the word 'agent' in the above. I take it we agree that it's perfectly alright for a _server_ to extract information from http: URIs, in particular to treat the path (or 'hierarchical part') as other than a literal path through a hierarchical storage medium. I guess where this gets tricky is when the _minters_ of URIs start relying on authority delegation in the path. Consider the ARK proposal (which I have always held up as a model of how to use http: URIs to address requirements similar to many of the requirements on XRI) [1]. It offers an approach in which e.g. http://loc.gov/ark:/12025/654xz321 http://rutgers.edu/ark:/12025/654xz321 identify the _same_ object. Implicit in the overall proposal is the proposition that the above example URIs were minted by people other than the owners of the domain names they begin with. The minters _are_ expected to be the owners of the subsidiary authority identified by 12025 in the above URIs, and it only makes sense for them to do so if they have an agreement in place with the owners of rutgers.edu and loc.gov to serve and/or proxy to representations as specified by the ARK RFC, which gives them a kind of second-hand ability to mint URIs. Are you happy with that kind of design? ht [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kunze-ark-15 - -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Half-time member of W3C Team 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIfPoKkjnJixAXWBoRArN9AJ9ylfYO8G/49J0Bp5iRYeYibcgi4QCfU+kS OxNOusJ3HoYEqxK5RQAyUAM= =VQUO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2008 19:28:02 UTC