Paul has volunteered (was Re: Overloaded URIs must GO!)

[Hunter, David]

James Tauber wrote:
<snip/>
> They just didn't seem to have a problem with the notion that 
> a single URL
> scheme would be used for both retrieving machine readable 
> information and
> for an irretrievable unique name.
> 
> I used the example of the XSLT namespace URI:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0
> 
> The URI above currently gives a 404. It is an irretrievable 
> unique name.
Using HTTP for URIs sounds intrinsically <em>bad</em> to me.  Suppose we
change that URI to something more like:
http://mycompanyname.com/XSL/Transform/1.0
(Just because most companies' web space may not be as tightly administered
as the W3C's...)  What happens when my web administrator decides to put a
default web page there, which happens to be a page about his cat Mittens?
Apart from the facetiousness of this example, we have the potential of the
same URI pointing to two completely different resources; I thought this was
not supposed to happen with URIs.

<snip/>
> *However*, I asked TimBL why on earth use an http URI for 
> this. He and Rohit
> both chimed that, some time down the track, it will the URL 
> for a document
> describing the namespace.
> 
> I told them that my problem with that is that is then you 
> have the *same*
> URI being used for both the namespace itself and a document 
> describing the
> namespace.
I agree.

> Both TimBL and Rohit (who invoked Roy Fielding's PhD thesis) said they
> didn't see that there was any distinction that warranted 
> different URIs.
I disagree.

> Maybe I've just missed something. When TimBL, Rohit Khare and (by proxy)
> Roy Fielding disagree with you on a URI matter, it is worth being nervous.
>
> JamesT

I agree with <em>this</em> too.  I'm in way over my head here... ;-)

David Hunter
david.hunter at mediaserv.com
MediaServ Information Architects
http://www.MediaServ.com

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