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This thread reminds me of a story. A few years ago, I bought a garbage
disposal from Sears for my in-laws. It was a gift that I was going to
install it myself. When my wife's folks opened the box, which was nicely
wrapped, they found a horrible looking, beat up, used garbage disposal. You
should have seen my mother-in-law's face. She thought it was a cruel hoax.
It wasn't. Once we got past the initial horror, it turned out to be a pretty
good laugh.
Someone had apparently returned a disposal to Sears, and had put their old
one in the box. It took some mighty fancy talking from me to get Sears to
accept the story of what happened, but they did, and I went home happy with
a brand new disposal.
So I offer a few observations:
1. Packages and labels are not immutable. I accept that packages and labels
may be misleading.
2. Though packages and labels can be misleading, I still trust that I'll
find what I expect when I open the box. I usually do.
3. If not, I can negotiate with the vendor and consumer and make it right.
Sometimes I'll get the short end of the deal, but usually not.
4. I sometimes find the unexpected at the other end of the arc when I
exercise a URI, but usually not.
5. Scheme names or some other simple mechanism could go a long way in giving
us a hint of what to expect out of a URI. Whenever I see "http://"; I expect
to be able to issue a GET. When I can't, that confuses me, as it does
others. I wish it wasn't the case. I live with it and hope for something
better, something like well-formed URIs that perform according to their
scheme. It's probably too late to hope for that, so I accept that packages
and labels can be misleading, and that I have to solve problems with
negotiation.
Mike
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