Overloaded URIs (was Re: XLink: behavior must go!)

[David Megginson]

Oren Ben-Kiki writes:

 > Simon St.Laurent <simonstl at simonstl.com> wrote:

 > >How much more weight should we really be putting on URIs?  We're going to
 > >need to be issuing directories of URIs and their meanings in different
 > >(Web, namespaces, now XLink) context if this keeps up.  I realize that
 > >they're about the only mechanism for which large-scale unique registration
 > >is currently available, but wow, this could be genuinely ugly in a few
 > >years (even months!).
 > 
 > It's genuinely ugly already :-) As you point out, don't really have a
 > choice. The alternatives have been pretty thoroughly discussed in the SAX
 > extensions naming threads a few months back, and all boil down to URIs or
 > something else based on DNS.

One possible solution would be to define a new URL protocol that
builds on HTTP URLs -- not as fancy as URNs, but they would build on
something that exists and is well understood:

  hname://www.megginson.com/ns/

It's not enough simply to build on DNS, since many people have rights
(however temporary) over part of a path but not over an entire host
name, as is the case for my account on Sprynet:

  http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

In place of this, you could use

  hname://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/namespace/

(for example) to build on this tiny patch of Web real-estate that I
rent.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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