RE: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 09:37 AM 04/01/01 -0500, Charles Reitzel wrote:
>1) RDDL looks good, but it directly competes w/ the existing OASIS work
>without offering any significant additional benefit.  

The OASIS stuff I know about is entity-catalogue stuff, which seems
like a different space.  Can you educate us with a couple of pointers?

>2) I don't think you can force anything down anyone's throats on this
>matter.  The NS spec is clear.

Agreed, but anything that purports to document a namespace should
not try and skip documenting it for humans, who at this point in
history are still the main consumers of such information.

>3) There appears to be grudging consensus that you shouldn't URL format
>(i.e. protocol identifier prefixes, host and domain, plus a file spec) as a
>namespace URI unless it actually works.  

I'm not sure I agree that there's consensus on this, but I think
the problem is harder because there is *no* consensus as to 
what kind of thing dereferencing the URL should get.  Thus
the recent flurry of proposals.

>Perhaps someone can point me to a good grammar for URL interpretation.  

I assume you've read the RFCs?  Nobody would say they're perfect,
but they have lots of crystal-clear grammar productions.  -Tim