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On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 12:07:20AM -0400, Mike Champion wrote:
> I fully agree that abstract "resources" and "namespaces" should have an
> authoritative description on the web. It just seems a conceptual muddle
> (as the 2+ years of this unresolved discussion prove, IMHO) to equate
> the permanent name of the abstract resource with something as
> ephemeral in practice as an HTTP URL. I'm still not seeing why
> the URL of the description can't be a property of the resource in some
> ontology. It doesn't solve the bootstrapping problem, but reliably
> resolving URNs seems like a solveable technical problem whereas the
> "HTTP URL == identity" equation inevitably leads to the circularity
> we've been wrestling with: how does one know whether the URI identifies
> the abstraction or just the location of a representation of it?
> Your original post clearly outlines the dilemma this leaves us with.
Repeat after me; URLs are nothing more than URIs with a resolution
mechanism. http://www.markbaker.ca is as much an URN or URL as
urn:markbaker (once I register it with Netsol, er, I mean IANA 8-).
It's just that the former is well deployed, but the latter is not.
So the choice is not between URLs and URNs, it's between the devil you
know (deployed HTTP URI scheme resolution), and the devil you don't
(DDDS).
If you expect URN namespace registration to eventually be any less of a
quagmire than ICANN, or any more "location independant" than DNS, then
I've got a, well, quagmire to sell you. 8-)
MB
--
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.idokorro.com
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