Re: iphone urls

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



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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]
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Received on Thursday, 2 October 2008 14:48:08 UTC