Am 13.12.2011 02:12, schrieb Paul Davis:
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Jason Smith<[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 12:01 AM, Paul Davis
<[email protected]> wrote:
I think you've contradicted yourself. If a URL is the universal name
for a database, then how are we able to server different databases
from the same URL?
The contradiction was intentional. URLs are usually but not always
stable. To re-invent a "universal identifier" for a "resource" sounds
futile, IMHO.
I'm going to be pedantic here a bit. And this is on purpose and I've
warned people. But I'll hopefully tie it back to reality.
First, URL stands for "uniform resource locator" where URI stands for
"uniform resource identifier". There's a very very important
distinction between these two things.
In CouchDB land we allow sharing of URL's between to resources (ie,
delete db, create db) are two logically distinct databases until a
replication pulls the new one into the "replicated web of dbs" where
things get a bit more subtle.
But this recycling of URLs I think firmly places them outside the
scope of URIs in this instance. If we had URLs of the form
"http://host:port/$UUID"; then I would argue in favor of the "URL is
URI" or perhaps "URL contains URI" type of approach. Though, we don't.
The URL is merely an alias to the actual database resource.
The distinction of the terms URI and URL or URN and such is rather
historically. In fact there is no specification for URL anymore, see:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/02/27/URL
An URI in the form of "http://example:port/some/path/or/uuid"; would be
globaly unique and as a nice sideeffect you can just dereference it to
actually find and access the databse.
Just my two Cents :)
