Manu Sporny wrote:
Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Kristof Zelechovski
<[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
Ian's question was about what happens when it goes down forever, or gets
taken over, intercepted, squatted, spoofed or redirected because of a
malicious DNS. I should have known better how to ask it. The
browser cache cannot handle these cases.
Consider the question to be asked by me as well. A host of a popular
format forgets to maintain its registration and gets squatted by a
malicious person. They pick up another url to host their schema on, but
legacy pages are still pointing to the old url and now may have poisoned
semantics. Do we have a recourse?
The way we deal with this today is by using a Persistent URL (aka: URL
re-direction service) such as purl.org[1] or xmlns.com[2]. We recommend
that all authors use such a service for their vocabularies. This is how
the Media, Audio, Video and Commerce RDF vocabularies are hosted.
Given the problems with using DNS as your registry noted above and the
fact that the recommended solution to this problem is to use a small
number of registries built atop DNS that promise greater longevity than
DNS registrations can ensure, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have a
single permanent registry that provides (at least for HTML 5) a
canonical prefix:url mapping. So instead of the use of cc:foo requiring
a deceleration of cc elsewhere in the document, cc would be declared at,
say, cc.rdfa.net and would be a globally unique prefix from the point of
view of the author. People not wanting to bother registering would just
have to use full URLs everywhere. This would seem to provide the "follow
your nose" principle you desire, remove several of the objections to
URL-based namespaces, make authoring for the common case of well known
vocabularies easier, and have only mildly different distributedness
characteristics to the current recommended practice.
