Subject: Re: URIs vs Strings

From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 15:06:45 -0600

On Thursday, August 26, 2004, at 02:09  PM, Ian Davis wrote:
> On 26/08/2004 19:15, Robert Sayre wrote:
>> These services take care of id generation for their users. Example 
>> feed:
>> http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/data/atom
>
> Understood , but blogger publishes to a site via FTP so it's a tool 
> provider with data storage like a web version of CityDesk or Radio 
> Userland. Would those tools be expected to generate tags based on the 
> citydesk or userland domains?  What happens if the tool developer goes 
> bust, gets acquired or changes its domain. Old versions of the tool 
> would continue to produce tags based on domains that are not owned by 
> the tool developer with potential conflicts.
A tool like Blogger could safely mint IDs using its own domain name -- 
for example http://www.blogger.com/<blogid>/2004/8/26/1 -- without fear 
of collisions between blogs.  If the domain name changes, the domain in 
new IDs would change, and the old one's would remain as there were.

Or they could use the domain name/path to which the blog is being FTPd.

Tools that are hosted on the client's server should use the client's 
domain.  They should have the ability to "remember" (in any of a 
variety of ways) the correct IDs for old entries, even if the domain on 
which the system is hosted changes.

> Surely the tag domains would have to be based on the publisher's 
> information, not the tool provider's. This means that the large number 
> of people without their own domain will be required to expose their 
> email addresses in every entry they publish.
Here's a thought: use a hash of your email address instead of the 
address itself.

I'd think that even blogs without domains all to themselves probably 
have their own unique base path, for example 
http://www.somebloghost.com/myblog/ vs. 
http://www.somebloghost.com/yourblog/.  If the ID includes that base 
path, the date, and something to distinguish between entries posted on 
the same date, for example, there shouldn't be a problem.