/ Tim Bray <tbray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
| On Feb 25, 2004, at 3:42 AM, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
|
|> The fact is that an entry needs both a URN (a globally
|> unique name) and a URL (a way to fetch it's HTML
|> representation from the Web). Unfortunately, the
|> IETF/W3C has replaced URLs and URNs with URIs (a
|> globally unique name that maybe also has a network
|> retrievable representation) which simply do not do the
|> same thing and lead to lots of confusion.
|
| Well, I'm one of the authors of the Web Arch doc that Dare's dissing,
| so it's predictable that I'd disagree. I have found the distinction
And equally predictable, or at least Tim should have been able to
predict it :-), that I'd agree. Dare's right.
I don't think the webarch document forbids the design that's being
proposed for Atom. It just says it isn't necessary. Fair enough.
It's still a good idea.
| between naming and locating to be philosophically untenable and
| practically of limited usefulness.
After years and years of debate, I have finally learned to bend my
understanding of the world such that I can believe that an address can
be used as a name. Now that strikes *me* as of limited usefulness, but
I'm so distinctly in the minority on this issue in most forums
(including the TAG) that I've mostly stopped fighting it.
| So I ask, why is it a fact that an entry needs these two things?
The use case that immediately springs to mind is the following: I
might reasonably want to syndicate my DocBook-related essays on the
DocBook web site. Perhaps I'll create docbook.org/blogs/ndw/... for
this purpose. Now when I write an essay, I might publish it on
norman.walsh.name and on docbook.org. It would appear in two feeds,
perhaps, with two different locations, but it'd be the same essay. I
don't want it to appear twice in my aggregator.
Similarly, if I become fabulously wealthy and decide to surrender to
vanity, I might buy walsh.com from the current owner and move my blog
site over there. That doesn't make all the old content "new" just
because it comes from a new location.
Damn it, I am "Norman Walsh". I am not "266 North Pleasant St".
| Why
| can't the ordinary old-fashioned URL also serve as an identifier? -Tim
I suppose it can. I don't care if you use http: URIs for your identifiers.
Just as long as you never change them, even when you republish your essays
on mynewserver.com.
Actually, I can't forbid you from changing them. But you have to
accept that the semantics of changing the id is that the essay is
totally new and utterly unrelated to whatever the old id was.
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx> | The things we have most longed for do
http://nwalsh.com/ | not happen; or if they do, it is never
| at the time nor under the circumstances
| when they could have made us
| happiest.--La Bruyère
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