Subject: RE: IANA, DNS names, URL names...

From: "Phillip M Hallam-Baker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 12:31:24 -0400

I am having difficulty following this discussion.

From where I stand the biggest problem is overloading of existing protocols
(particularly HTTP) for purposes far from the original design intent. A
large part of the motivation for this behaviour being to circumvent
corporate firewall restrictions.

Code re-use and specification re-use is a good thing - but only up to a
point. If the principle 'never create a new protocol if an old one will
serve' had been applied then HTTP would never have been invented since it is
_possible_ to do everything that can be done with HTTP with FTP, albeit in a
considerably less efficient manner (and I speak as someone who has
implemented both protocols and can give the number of IP round trips
required in both cases).

The basic structure of a URL is how://where/what. All three components serve
a different function. One does not re-invent how without good reason.

URIs, which are a superset of URLs and URNs also have the same structure,
albeit the syntax in use clearly differs from that proposed in various
'experimental' RFCs. This is one of those cases where certain folk have had
very definite views on the syntax. VERY VERY definite views, but which have
lacked any explanation which is why I suspect they have been ignored.

It appears to me that the tv scheme is really a URN scheme rather than a URL
scheme. There is considerable utility in a naming mechanism which allows
resources to be identified, even if it is not possible to retrieve them.

Unfortunately I do not see any means of resolving the issue at this stage.
The URN working group proposed a syntax that bears no relation to the URL
syntax and introduced spurious 'requirements' that had no justification
(actually they might have had a justification but people steadfastly refused
to ever give me one, for seven years I have been told "that was decided
before you arrived" and "It is too late to change that now, we have to
finish in 3 months").

In short I don't think the IETF need argue about the matter any further
because people trying to build stuff in the real world have long since
learned to ignore the IETF working groups claiming 'ownership' of the area.

		Phill