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Jonathan Rochkind writes: > > Organization need to have a clear understanding of what they are > > minting URIs for. > > Precisely. And in the real world... they don't always have > that. Neither the minters nor the users of URIs, especially the > users of http URIs, where you can find so many potential http URIs > that are different but seem to refer to the same thing. > > ONE of the benefits of info is that the registry process forces > minters to develop that clear understanding (to some extent), and > documents it for later users. There are also other pros and cons. > > But again, I think http URIs _used appropriately_ can certainly > serve the same purpose as info uris. In actuality, there seems to > be a lot of things causing people to use them inappropriately. This is the best (and, maybe not coincidentally) the most concise summary of the issue that I've read. Houghton,Andrew writes: > People see http: and assume that it means the HTTP protocol so it > must be a locator. [...] People don't understand what RFC 3986 is > saying. It makes no claim that any URI registered scheme has > persistence or can be dereferenced. An HTTP URI is just a token to > identify some resource, nothing more. This is technically true ... just as it's technically true that a female breast is just a piece of fatty tissue. But, just like boobies, http: URLs carry a LOT of cultural baggage and all sorts of connotations -- some just wired into our minds, some coded right down into our mail-readers and other software -- and they simply cannot be realistically seen in that light by the great majority of people. I suppose the bottom line is that, although we all agree that http: URLs can indeed serve as identifiers, there are lots of good "soft" reasons why it's useful to be able to tell a location from an identifier at a glace -- both for busy people and for lazy software. So to my surprise I am finding myself sort of reconciled with info: URIs, even though I didn't like them at first. (Although I'd like like them more if I could mint them myself wihout needing to go through a registration process, like I can with http: URLs. Something like info:bydomain:miketaylor.org.uk/someSchema/1.0) _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________ /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk )_v__/\ You have to take me in the spirit in which I'm intended.