Re: URI resolver was Re: RDDL and XML Schemas Proposed Recommendation

[Justin Couch <justin@vlc.com.au>]

Michael Mealling wrote:

> In some sense you could interpret the 30x series of HTTP responses
> as a I2L service. Its a shame we never implemented I2LS (one URI to
> a list of equivalent ones) in HTTP....

Well, that's what THTTP is for :) I've used it in previous projects for
doing that sort of thing. However it was more for resolving URNs to a
list of URLs and then collating and correlating the returned results to
get an idea of the real picture.
 
> > Firstly, your end user application has to know how to deal with generic
> > URIs. As I mentioned above, a typical web browser does not allow
> > plugging in of generic URI resolver DLLs.
> 
> Actually IE does. But it means you have to insert yourself in between
> IE and its URI plugin interface which means you have to duplicate
> everything Microsoft is doing. It isn't trivial. ;-)

Well I stand corrected for one browser. However, Mear Mortels(TM) will
have problems dealing with this and it is not a generalised solution for
all applications running on an MS platform I suspect. I remember the old
plugin work you'd done but when I last looked at the pages a few months
ago the dates were still back in 1999. Consequently I'd written them off
as being no longer available.
 
> scheme. It can be generalized to generic URI resolution but its still
> a question of where you put it into the browser. Putting it into a parser
> is rather easy since its probably something like a fancy entity resolver.

Yes, In my currently unreleased version of the library I have a SAX
EntityResolver implementation that goes off and does that.
 
> Yep. Its the old story of does the URI identify the thing in the box
> or the box itself. The answer is that you should have three URIs: one
> for the box, one for whatever is currently in the box. and possibly
> several for the thing that is the contents. If your URI identifies
> an abstract thing that can change its representation then you have
> to deal with that in your application or pick a different URI.

That I suppose is just dealing with the content type of the returned
object. Just look for the content type and then bin it if you don't like
it and try the next option. 
 
> As a point of information: this entire space is something that the
> W3C URI Interest Group is looking at as an area of joint work with
> the IETF. The goal is to look at standardizing some vocabularies and
> services more concretely so that its easier to describe the entire
> space as a single infrastructure service. I think our deadline is
> the end of next month so you should be seeing something shortly....

Well, that's news to me. I'm on all three lists and haven't heard a peep
from either for a month or more. xml-uri has basically turned into a
haven for spammers over the last couple of months. The W3C list hasn't
faired much better either. Would be nice if the powers that be actually
bothered to inform the user community that something was being done. I
would certainly be involved, but I've never heard a thing. I've been
floating around URI/URN land for about 3 years now and never once heard
mention about this.

-- 
Justin Couch                         http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant                  http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer                  http://www.j3d.org/
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