The W3C
Technical Architecture Group, on
which I had the
honour to serve for a couple
of years, is working on a document called
URNs,
Namespaces, and Registries. Norm Walsh, longtime TAG member, has written
a
human-readable version,
and I recommend it.
The question of how to name things is persistently one of the hardest in
Computer Science, and one of the reasons the Web succeeds is that it does a
pretty good job, using URIs.
If you’re thinking “Doesn’t he really mean URL?”, check out
The Universal Republic of
Love).
However, every so often a group of people says “Hey, URIs beginning with
http: are addresses, not names, and we need names, persistent
names, so we’ll invent a new URI scheme.” They are nearly always wrong;
it takes a whole lot of thinking about the notions of names and addresses to
achieve clarity, and wanting a new URI scheme is usually evidence that you
haven’t. I’ve tried to explain this dozens of times, but I think Norm does a
better job than I ever have.
