xml-dev - IRAL (was Public Identifiers)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 09:49 AM 9/18/98 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>Here I agree.
...
>Thus, at most, the URN/URL or public
>ID/system ID distinction can only express *intent*, it cannot guarantee
>results.

What Eliot said.  Every word of it.

>In hindsight, it's clear to me that we never should have allowed public IDs
>in XML.  Oh well.

Well yeah, and a large majority of the WG agreed, and in fact we voted
'em down no less than 3 times as I recall, but the SIG howled until blood
ran from our ears and it was obvious that they weren't going to stop, so
we eventually decided that they weren't actually damaging and if that
many people wanted them that badly, they ought to have them.

>This is not to say that the URN idea is totally useless ...
> I would much rather have some sort of name
>structure, such as:

Now there's a really good idea.  It's severely irritating that UR*'s
have all sorts of internal markup that most application are required
to pretend isn't there... in fact, anything that is going to be generally 
useful for addressing across the internet is probably going to have all 
sorts of internal structure, why not publish it?

Takers for developing IRAL (Internet Resource Addressing Language),
an application of XML?  Then you could have, instead of a URI plus
an XPointer, an IRAL plus an XPointer, and you'd really have something
you could do some work with. -Tim

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