Houghton,Andrew writes:
 > >  > Take, for instance, DOIs.  What do you see in the wild?  Do
 > >  > you ever see info:uris (except in OpenURLs)?  If you don't see
 > >  > http://dx.doi.org/ URIs you generally see doi:10... URIs.  It
 > >  > seems like having http and info URIs would *have* to be fine,
 > >  > since info:uris *not being dereferenceable* are far less
 > >  > useful (I won't go so far as 'useless') on the web, which is
 > >  > where all this is happening.
 > > 
 > > What on earth does dereferencing have to do with this?
 > > 
 > > We're talking about an identifier.
 > 
 > Exactly, that is what people don't understand about RFC 3986.  URIs
 > are just identifiers and have nothing to do with dereferencing.
 > Dereferencing only comes into play when the URI is used with an
 > actual protocol like HTTP.  The only thing the http:, e.g., URI
 > scheme, starting the URI tells you is what the syntax of the rest
 > of the URI looks like.  This is where the authors of info URIs
 > missed the boat.  They conflated the URI scheme, e.g., http:, with
 > dereferencing and used it as a justification for a new URI scheme.
 > The authors were told of that misconception before info became an
 > RFC by both the IETF and W3C [...]

... and by me, for what's it's worth (remember, Ray? :-)) ...

 > [...], but they decided to proceed anyway creating another library
 > specific standard that no one else will use.
 > 
 > If people would just follow the prescribed practice by the W3C:
 > 
 > <http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/> 
 > Architecture of the Web says:
 > 
 > 2.3.1. URI aliases
 > 
 > Best practice: "A URI owner SHOULD NOT associate arbitrarily
 > different URIs with the same resource."
 > 
 > 2.4. URI Schemes
 > 
 > Best practice: "A specification SHOULD reuse an existing URI scheme
 > (rather than create a new one) when it provides the desired
 > properties of identifiers and their relation to resources."

True -- it's all there.

The problem is that, after setting up a non-dereferencable http: URI
to name something like an XML namespace or a CQL context set, it's
just so darned _tempting_ to put something explanatory at the location
which happens to be indicated by that URI  :-)

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