- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 09:54:15 PST
- To: "Warner ten Kate" <tenkate@natlab.research.philips.com>, "Michael A. Dolan" <miked@tbt.com>
- Cc: <www-tv@w3.org>
The questions of "what is a URN" or "what is a URL" tend to lean away from engineering and toward philosophy or even religion. I suggest a different approach. Imagine, for a moment, the possibility that an author might want to create content which is intended to be delivered MORE THAN ONE WAY. That is, not JUST by 'tv', but, say, the same content delivered EITHER by 'tv' OR via HTTP on a (forfend) regular old PC. But what would a regular old PC do with this "tv" URL? Clearly it doesn't mean "turn on the TV now and watch it". There's some other semantics that is actually wanted; you're invoking some image which is inherited from the context, I suppose. I'm not entirely sure. I urge you to think out of the box and come up with a design that's actually useful in multiple contexts. Sometimes you get boxed in by imagining a world in which everyone is just watching interacting with web pages while watching their TV. But people don't just watch the web. They save it, store it, forward it, mail it, put it in databases, search it. How could you design something that would work in all those other scenarios, at least as well as today's 'best practice' URL uses? Don't create a design that's _only_ useful for "www-tv". Larry
Received on Sunday, 14 February 1999 12:54:27 UTC