Re: base and atom:id

[Graham <dtcd@xxxxxxx>]

On 24 Feb 2004, at 8:12 pm, Danny Ayers wrote:

> But I do think there still needs to be some more low-level 
> clarification
> around <id> and <link>. There seems to be a kind of tacit 
> understanding that
> <id> will be a static URN and <link> will be a URL that might change. 
> I'm
> not sure this is altogether consistent with general web architecture, 
> at
> best it's confusing.

At best, it's a perfectly sound idea. There is absolutely no technical 
reason to:
a) Require each identifier to resolve to an HTML representation of a 
resource.
b) Require the address of each entry's HTML representation to have all 
of the special properties its identifier must have (persistence, 
uniqueness, etc)

The confusing thing would be to conflate the two functions into one 
string.

> I've a feeling (which is reflected on the Wiki page) that essentially 
> <id>
> is an attempt to mimic RSS 2.0's <guid>. The web has a far better 
> construct
> for the purpose, the URI. GUIDs are fine if you want to make sure 
> things are
> unique on your LAN, but the network has grown a little since the 
> 1980's.

But aren't we already using URIs?

Graham

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