At Thu, 2 Apr 2009 11:34:12 -0400,
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> […]
>
> I think too much of this conversation is about people's ideal vision of 
> how things _could_ work, rather than trying to make things work as best 
> as we can in the _actual world we live in_, _as well as_ planning for 
> the future when hopefully things will work even better.  You need a 
> balance between the two.

This is a good point. But as I see it, the web people - for lack of a
better word - *are* discussing the world we live in. It is those who
want to re-invent better ways of doing things who are not.

HTTP is here. HTTP works. *Everything* (save one) people want to do
with info: URIs or urn: URIs or whatever already works with HTTP.

I can count one thing that info URIs possess that HTTP URIs don’t: the
‘feature’ of not ever being dereferenceable. And even that is up in
the air - somebody could devise a method to dereference them at any
time. And then where are you?

> […]
>
> a) Are as likely to keep working indefinitely, in the real world of
> organizations with varying levels of understanding, resources, and
> missions.

Could somebody explain to me the way in which this identifier:

<http://suphoa5d.org/phae4ohg>

does not work *as an identifier*, absent any way of getting
information about the referent, in a way that:

<info:doi/10.10.1126/science.298.5598.1569>

does work?

I don’t mean to be argumentative - I really want to know! I think
there may be something that I am missing here.

> b) Are as likely as possible to be adopted by as many people as possible 
> for inter-operability. Having an ever-increasing number of possible 
> different URIs to represent the same thing is something to be avoided if 
> possible.

+1

> c) Are as useful as possible for the linked data vision.

+1

> […]

best,
Erik



;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3