Private naming conventions and hypermedia (was Re: Draft minutes from TAG telcon of 2008-07-24

> HST [...] I think there's a fundamental issue we need to be clear on: is it OK for a group of domain name owners to agree a naming convention amongst themselves? In the ARK case, this trespasses on the WebArch advice wrt aliasing, and in general might also seem to fall foul of the whole business of URI opacity (that was Mark Baker's particular concern).

"URI Opacity" is a term that I've found means different things to
different folks, so I try to avoid it now.  But I do believe that
private naming conventions do cause harm to the Web because they are
essentially a proprietary form of link and link metadata.  If two URIs
at different domains identify the same resource, dereferencing one of
them should provide a declaration (Link header, RDFa, whatever) that
the resource is the same (owl:sameAs or equivalent) as the other.

>From a REST perspective, the architectural constraint that's being
disregarded by this practice is "hypermedia as the engine of
application state", and IMO, it's the constraint most responsible for
imparting Web-nature.

Cheers,

Mark.

Received on Friday, 25 July 2008 16:42:40 UTC