On Jan 30, 2005, at 7:10 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
The content of an Identity construct SHOULD NOT be dereferenced, even when it comes from a
normally dereferencable scheme. There is no requirement for the content to represent a URI
where a version of the feed or entry may be found.
I'm +1 on this,
-1. And I *will* lie down in the road.
For "ongoing", I plan to use the same http: URIs for both the <atom:id> and <link rel="alternate">; I will manage (and have managed) my URI space so that they will meet the requirements of permanence, uniqueness, and so on. In this case the <atom:id> URI will absolutely be dereferenced, but only in its <link> role. The language above could be read as discouraging what I'm planning to do, and what I'm planning to do is perfectly good practice. Anyhow, per both IETF RFCs and the W3C web-architecture spec, no harm can be done merely by trying a GET on any URI, so saying SHOULD NOT is just bogus.
I think what you're really trying to say is this:
"When using <atom:id> to ascertain whether two Atom entries or feeds are the same, such operations MUST be based only on the URI character strings, and MUST NOT rely on dereferencing the URIs."
See, it's a MUST, even... would that meet Graham & Paul's issues? -Tim
