My main concern was systems where people pass references to content between each other, for example when using messenger or adding a reference link into wikipedia.
Another useful thing of a consistent link system would be using google to find who is referring to it as you can use the link:<url> (link: watch.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/3/12) to find who is linking to the content. I guess you could have use it without a parameter to access a browser-based HTML content by default and in machine readable formats (XML) using a well-known parameter (http://watch.bbc.co.uk/oneshow/2/2?xml) which could be used for mashups... On 13/07/07, Gareth Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/13/07, Steve Jolly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Only if you think of a location URL as a key, not a value. It's > certainly convenient to be able to do so, and it can work well in a > web-centric world under circumstances where you can uniquely identify > content by its location. In general, URIs and URLs are different beasts > though, and for good reasons. Certainly, I imagine that you'll want to be able to distinguish between a string that identifies a TV program which a set top box can expect to record off-air, and an arbitrary URL like http://google.com . I want to be able to tell my box (which isn't on the net) to record Doctor Who, but I don't want to be able to tell it to try to record google. So, if you're going to use a URL as the primary key for identifying a TV program, then I guess you want to have a definite schema for what constitutes a valid TV program URL, as opposed to any arbitrary web address. You could do that by making it a rule that all valid TV program URLs begin "http://www.bbc.co.uk/tvprogram/"; - but that might annoy other broadcasters. It would also mean that the "http://www.bbc.co.uk/tvprogram"; but of the URL was redundant, and you'd likely end up with only the absolutely necessary parts of the URL being broadcast in the on-air EPG (to save that tiny bit of valuable on-air bandwidth). At this point, the identifier you actually use starts to look quite like a CRID anyway... ;) G - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
-- Please email me back if you need any more help. Brian Butterworth www.ukfree.tv
