Re: A simpler proposal: PaceAtomIDAsString

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@xxxxxxx>]

* Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>Greetings again. The earlier thread on atom:id made it clear that 
>people really, really want to compare things consistently, and that 
>using URIs might get in the way of that. Thus, I have made a 
>simplifying proposal at 
><http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceAtomIDAsString>.

Hmm, it would make more sense to me to specify that the content must
be for example the uc(md5_hex()) of some reasonably unique data and
that implementations must not change the id without the user's consent,
specifically not if [common cases]. That would avoid confusion about
normalizing, resolving, dereferencing, comparing, ... the id, which
scheme to choose, how to structure it, etc. while still providing the
necessary functionality. It would certainly yield in duplicate IDs and
there will still be authors and implementations that do not generate
proper IDs, but as far as I can see implementations will have to deal
with that anyway. Your proposal just obfuscates the issue as common
practise will likely be to use URIs anyway, which would likely yield
in all the problems we have when the spec says it is a more special
kind of string.