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RE: URIs harmful

• To: <jborden@a...>
• Subject: RE: URIs harmful
• From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
• Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 10:10:25 -0700
• Cc: "Mark Baker" <distobj@a...>,"John Cowan" <jcowan@r...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Thread-index: AcI0xEtJ//hjZ1P1S6WvNPAvs7NALwAACh/Q
• Thread-topic: URIs harmful

> I am totally in favor of allowing whom ever registers a DNS entry
> to tell me what they intend URIs which use their DNS name to mean.

Great, then you and they have a consensus between exactly two parties
which requires fiat and "telling" to establish.  That's fine.  It's just
rather useless in a global context.

> Despite your continuing protests and declarations, you've not given me
a
> single concrete reason why the URIs that _I_ create using DNS entries
that
>_I_ register ought always to refer to documents. Indeed

That's because I never said you had to.  YOU can use URIs in as
context-sensitive a manner as you wish.

> If you are going to disagree, fine, but I've still not seen a
compelling
> reason for you to restrict my use of URIs.

It's not a matter of restricting.  Most people will make reasonable
assumptions about the nature of a resource being identified based on its
name (why would the name include a particular token, like "http:",  if
it doesn't serve to identify, anyway?)

If you fly against the reasonable assumptions people make, and declare
that in YOUR identifiers, the "scheme" part is irrelevant, that's not
enough.  You also then have to change what everyone else does, because
"words mean what people use them to mean".  People will reasonably ask,
"why restrict my interpretation of the name that way?"

You can ask them to read a contract on your site, or ask them to invent
new probabilistic artificial intelligence reasoning systems to get at
the "true" meaning.  But most people won't.  Most people will assume
that the "http:" part of the name is relevant to the identity.  

You can spend your entire life trying to force people to interpret your
URI the way that *you* intend, but it's kind of silly to pick such an
uphill battle.

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