On Nov 18, 2009, at 06:12 , Julian Reschke wrote: > Arun Ranganathan wrote: >> 3. We could not directly call out a URI scheme at all. The benefit of doing >> this is we can specify *behavior* without actually getting into details >> about the actual identifier scheme used. But, the chief reason to not take >> this course of action is that leaving *anything* unspecified on the web >> platform leads to reverse engineering in ways that we can't envision >> currently. Developers may rely on quirks within one implementation and >> incompatibly use them with other implementations. Having to "mimic" another >> user agent's behavior has been a common outcome on the web, due to lack of >> specifications -- *many* examples of this exist on the web throughout its >> history. One lesson from the browser competition of the past is to avoid >> leaving things to guesswork. I'd like us to agree on something, and I'd >> like that agreement to be bolstered with concrete implementor feedback. >> ... > > Not requiring a specific scheme is not exactly the same thing as "leaving it > unspecified". If the *only* use of the identifier is within the API, the > syntactical form of the identifier really doesn't matter as long as it's > understood by the those parts of the platform that need to. > > Requiring a specific scheme here seems to be a case of *overspecifying*.
It always seems that way, until one day one of the implementers gets smart. Say, if you're returning an opaque URL, why not put useful information in it as well? So where one vendor returns virtual:4F922EFF-02F8-42CD-9E96-04E909E099F3 another will start returning file-handle:2017/?type=image/svg+xml;size=4242;dahut=true;unicorn=pink. And then you have authors finding that useful, using it, complaining to other implementers that they don't support it, etc. Just because we seem to be going through an enlightened period of reasonably responsible UA vendors doesn't mean it'll last, either. Couldn't we just register a URN NID for this? It seems that one has to go through fewer hurdles, and no matter how transient I believe that it's a useful thing to identify. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
