Here¹s my response for ³why resource ids instead of uris²: An ³ALTO Server² is a collection of services provided by a provider. That provider may distribute these services over several different physical servers, and that distribution may change over time. If we used URIs to identify those services, the IDs would have to change whenever the provider redistributed services.
Therefore we defined ³Resource IDs² as persistent, location-independent, IDs for those services. Resource IDs must be unique, but only within the context of one provider¹s services that is, the services defined by the tree of IRDs reachable from a root IRD. That IRD tree maps those Resource IDs to URIs, and allows the provider to change the mapping without disrupting clients. Thus ALTO Resource IDs are relative to the URI of the provider¹s IRD tree. If a provider had to use globally unique, location-dependent URIs, instead of location-independent relative IDs, the provider would have an unnecessary administrative burden. (Yes, I know ³URIs², unlike URLs, are supposed to be ³location independent.² But let¹s face reality: that only works if there¹s some higher level mapping of URIs to locations. For all practical purposes, ³URI² means host-specific ³URL².) Another way to look at it is that ³Resource IDs² are like using relative addresses within a web page. They make it easier to move a tree of related pages from one host to another. - Wendy Roome From: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email protected]> Date: Sun, January 26, 2014 at 16:40 To: Martin Thomson <[email protected]> Cc: "N:" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, Richard Alimi <[email protected]>, "Reinaldo Penno, (repenno)" <[email protected]>, Wendy Roome <[email protected]>, Sebastian Kiesel <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-alto-protocol-25 Section 10.2 defines a resource ID. Why do this when you could use URIs? After all, that's what URIs are for. I realize that this would be something of a major change to the protocol, but I think that the question is particularly important.
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