[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Public Identifiers
At 08:59 AM 9/19/98 -0400, david@m... wrote: >Henry S. Thompson writes: > > > "W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@d...> writes: > > > > > [names without a public resolution mechanism can never be really > > > universal] > > > > So has the W3C, as the obvious entity with a budget and an interest in > > a solution to this problem, ever showed its hand wrt this issue? > >Internet hostnames have a distributed and efficient public resolution >mechanism, so they easily meet Eliot's criterion (as do URLs, more >generally but with a few limitations); the problem with hostnames is >not that they are not universal, but that they are not persistent: a >hostname may have only one owner and resolve to only one IP address at >any given moment, but next week the owner and IP address can be >different. But doesn't "persistent" mean "when I request a thing, I get one"? Persistence is defined by the resource owner--if I transfer ownership of drmacro.com to someone else and they serve it from a different machine with a different IP address, it's still drmacro.com if we say it is, and if we do, then the drmacro.com resource is persistent. If we say "no, it's a new and different drmacro.com, then the resource isn't persistent. But changing the IP address and ownership of the resource doesn't necessarily affect the persistence. Of course, there can always be a mismatch between the expectations and desires of resource users with regards to persistence and the expectations and desires of resource owners. The owner of the LA Dodgers baseball team probably considers the Dodgers to have exhibited persistence as a team since it started life as the Brooklyn Dodgers--fans from Brooklyn may not agree. Persistence in a network environment can really only mean "it's more likely to be there than not" or "I get what I expect to get". Nothing is truly persistent. I don't see much profit in getting too existential about the term "persistence". I think the real issue is about management of persistence: how easy is it for resource owners to manage names so that the use of a given name gives the appropriate result for the appropriate length of time and how easy is it for resource users to invoke those names. Cheers, E. -- <Address HyTime=bibloc> W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer ISOGEN International Corp. 2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202. 214.953.0004 www.isogen.com </Address> xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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