This thread is getting a bit off topic, but... On Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:49:33 -0500, bill-auger wrote: > i wll mention this next bit for completeness, only because no one else > has yet; though luke alluded to it (lest this thread go irreversibly off > topic) - that 'URL' stands for "universal resource locater" and 'URI' > stands for "universal resource identifier" - that very plainly means > that they are intended to refer to or identify, unambiguously, the > single canonical location of a single definitive resource
That is wrong on 2 counts. A URI is not necessarily canonical, and it does not identify a location. A URI identifies a resource... *somehow*. A URL is a type of URI that identifies the resource by giving a location for it. That location is not necessarily unique, and it is not necessarily canonical. It's just a location that the resource can be found at. For URIs that are not URLs, the client must have a priori knowledge about where and how to access the identified resource, because the URI doesn't tell it; for example: "URN:ISBN:0-395-36341-1" uniquely identifies Webster's II New Riverside Dictionary (1984 edition), but tells a client nothing about how to retrieve it. (For all URIs, the client must have a priori knowledge about how to interpret the URI scheme used by the URI; the scheme being identified by the bit before the first colon; a registry of URI schemes is maintained by IANA.) URIs using the "http" and "https" URI schemes are, of course, URLs. -- Happy hacking, ~ Luke Shumaker
