xml-dev - Re: URIs as IDs in ModSAX (was Re: ModSAX (SAX 1.1) Proposal) (fwd)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Dan Brickley writes:

 > That was not the proposal. The proposal was to allow SAX features
 > to be individuated using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs
 > are a superset of URLs and URNs, so a non-URL URI might be
 > used. The XML-Data proposal, admirably, used uuid: URIs to make
 > this point.  (eg.  urn:uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882/ )

Thanks to Dan for pointing that out to everyone.  My comments that
follow are addressed not to Dan's points (with which I agree) but to
the question of URNs in general.

URNs are not suitable for use right now because there is no
specification available on how to use them.  That means that

  http://www.megginson.com/ns/foo

can be guaranteed unique, but

  urn:inet:megginson.com:ns:foo

cannot (because there's no standard for what 'inet' means).

In other words, URNs might be better some day, but they're worthless
to us now, and given that people have been talking about them for most
of the 1990s without really producing anything, I'm becoming doubtful
that they'll ever see light.  Can anyone correct me or provide more
information?


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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