- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 10:48:55 -0400
- To: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)
- Cc: Mark Nottingham <mnot@yahoo-inc.com>, Stefan Eissing <stefan.eissing@greenbytes.de>, W3C TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
Yes. I would also point out that when I first joined the TAG I started to pull together some thoughts in a draft of a finding titled "URI Schemes and Web Protocols" the latest draft of which was written in 2005 and is available at [1]. This was the third attempt at a draft, and I felt at the time that we were not converging on answers. Part of that was that, being new to the TAG, I felt I was coming up to speed on some of the issues, which was preventing me from doing an efficient job of getting to the heart of the issues. I also came to believe that there was lack of consensus on key points, and the time did not then seem right for trying to drive to consensus. If you follow the links to previous drafts you'll find that there were major changes in the presentation in each round, and it did not seem that the third had left us much closer to success than the first. I do think there are some good fragments of ideas in all of them. So, I put the work aside, with the intention that it might be picked up either when I had a clearer sense of what should be said, or when the TAG seemed closer to consensus on what the key messages should be. I should emphasize that [1] therefore does NOT represent consensus of the TAG, but it does show some of the attempts I made to tell a story. It's been in the back of my mind that we should pick this up sometime, though we'd have to be a bit careful about overlap with the URNS and Registries work I think. Also, note that RFC 2718 provides "Guidelines for new URL Schemes". I think section 2.3 is pertinent, albeit at a very high level: ------ 2.3 Demonstrated utility URL schemes should have demonstrated utility. New URL schemes are expensive things to support. Often they require special code in browsers, proxies, and/or servers. Having a lot of ways to say the same thing needless complicates these programs without adding value to the Internet. The kinds of things that are useful include: o Things that cannot be referred to in any other way. o Things where it is much easier to get at them using this scheme than (for instance) a proxy gateway. ------ Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/SchemeProtocols.html [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2718.txt -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 -------------------------------------- ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson) Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org 10/02/2008 09:09 AM To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@yahoo-inc.com> cc: Stefan Eissing <stefan.eissing@greenbytes.de>, W3C TAG <www-tag@w3.org>, (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM) Subject: Re: iphone urls -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mark Nottingham writes: > Seriously, though. Looking through the TAGs findings, I think most of > the relevant documents are too dense to be useful to developers like > this. > > How about a "So You Want to Create a URI Scheme" guide, with practical > advice about when it's a good idea and when it's not, examples, trade- > offs, caveats, and details of what this means in *existing* code? Thanks for the suggestion -- In fact, in response to similar criticisms of the TAG's initial attempt in this area ([1], note this has been languishing w/o updates for over two years, _mea culpa_) we're trying to evolve that draft finding more in the direction you suggest: the working title is "Dirk and Nadia design a naming scheme". A version should appear here in the next few weeks. ht [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50-2006-08-17.html - -- 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) 131 651-1426, 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) iD8DBQFI5MgakjnJixAXWBoRAtZMAJ0TBrolVd/baS1mkAthNXrx1VQpdgCfX1AS GZsttxU3F2KCId757ANWPzE= =KfAQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Thursday, 2 October 2008 14:48:08 UTC