On Dec 6, 2008, at 9:58 AM, timeless wrote:
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Jonathan Rees
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I hate to burst ignorantly into a discussion I know little about...
but
that's what I'm going to do. Forgive me.
Regarding the creation of local URIs for use in APIs requiring
URIs: I want
to consider, just as a what-if meant for clarification of
requirements, the
use of the tag: URI scheme [1], which appears on first blush to be
a good
fit.
Suppose that the desired suffix of the URI is to be zzz. The URI
would look
like
tag:widgets-r-us.org,2008:8948372837/zzz
i'm 99% certain this is in the minutes from the F2F, a WUA needs to be
able to instantiate multiple discreet instances of a widget, and needs
to be able to distinguish them. the instances need to be distinct.
Whether distinct instances should be able to enumerate and connect is
not currently decided but for future improvement the scheme shouldn't
prohibit this.
OK, if you need to distinguish the instances, give each a different
tag: URI. You could identify the instance using an entropy-generated
bit string, and maintain a mapping from bit string to instance. Or, if
you have some other way to designate an entity internally, such as
process id + index into a table, you could put that information, or a
hash of it, into the tag: URI, in combination with entropy or some
other hash if you like. I hope it is clear that I'm not specifying a
particular way to choose the tag: URI, as I can't because I don't know
details of your requirements or architecture (sorry). The question
was: Using tag: you can do just about anything you want in the way of
exposing and/or hiding information (probably ten or twenty options
here depending on what information and entropy feeds in and how/when/
whether it's hashed), so why not use tag: ?
In other words, if you think file: and http: have problems, the tag:
URI scheme might provide a way out that does not require registering a
new URI scheme. You still have a design problem (which you would have
regardless), but at least you avoid one source of unpleasantness.
Jonathan
