Subject: RE: Atom namespace name

From: "David Orchard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:35:28 -0800

I strongly prefer http URIs.  I find the W3C Web Arch is sufficiently
motivating.  

I haven't seen IETF documents that directly refute the Web Arch advocacy
of http URIs for namespace names.  I don't recall them sending in any
comments on this during the Web Arch Last Call, so that seems like
implicit endorsement.  If there's some IETF vs W3C brouhaha on URNS vs
http URIs, let them sort it out.  And if the IETF won't help with http:
URI assignment, I bet the W3C would.  I idly wonder if you could use the
RFC HTTP for the ns.  

Cheers,
Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:owner-atom-
> [email-masked]] On Behalf Of Tim Bray
> Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 3:17 PM
> To: 'Atom WG'
> Subject: Atom namespace name
> 
> 
> I've been talking with Scott Hollenbeck, our IETF area director, about
> IETF standard practice for namespace names, and he said:
> 
> <scott>
> The closest thing we have to a guideline is described in RFC 3688.
I'd
> recommend following the URN structure described in that document, but
> that
> leaves some freedom for the string used to identify the namespace.
> Something like "atom-1.0" could work, but I'm open to suggestions.
> 
> You can see the list of namespaces that have already been registered
> here:
> 
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/xml-registry/ns.html
> </scott>
> 
> This would give us a namespace name something like
> "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:atom" which is OK I guess.  I said that I
liked
> HTTP URIs for namespace names because they leave open the door for
> putting some helpful info there and for things like RDDL.
Furthermore,
> in RFC3470, which Scott co-wrote, section 4.9 agrees with me.  So do
> sections 3.5  and 4.5.4 of the W3C's "Architecture of the World Wide
> Web".
> 
> Scott acknowledged this, but told me that if we go with the RFC3688
> flow, there will be no fuss, no muss, and we'll get our namespace name
> smoothly and quickly.  If we wanted to stand on principle for an HTTP
> name, we'd have to explain why to a whole bunch of people, and then
> there's the problem that the IETF doesn't maintain web space for this
> kind of thing, so maybe it should be in www.iana.org; anyhow, lots of
> extra work.
> 
> So... what's the sentiment of the WG?  -Tim

---

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 21:18:08 +0100

On 11 Nov 2004, at 19:35, David Orchard wrote:

>  I idly wonder if you could use the
> RFC HTTP for the ns.

I was thinking further that not only should the URI point to the 
directory in which the RFC is located, but the same directory should 
contain an OWL description of the resources. Using content negotiation, 
a browser would thereby download the RFC in html or text format, but a 
RDF agent would download the OWL file describing the ontology behind 
the format.

There are many ways of doing this. This is the way things are organized 
for the Biography ontology at

     <http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/>

The above URI gives you an overview of the Biography terms.
Each of the terms is then seperately defined in its own directory. For 
example the
<http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/Birth> uri, leads one to both the html or the 
rdf version of the definition, depending on content negotiation. The 
same uri the provides a machine readable and human readable definition.

In the case of Atom this would mean there would be a

http://ietf.org/somedir/atom/1.0/

directory in which the RFC would be located, in text and perhaps html 
form.

There would then be further directories such as

http://ietf.org/somedir/atom/1.0/Feed

Which would contain the html and rdf/owl definition of a Feed object.

This would be so cool!

Henry

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:25:49 +0900

At 03:35 04/11/12, David Orchard wrote:
 >implicit endorsement.

(just for the record) The IETF (which in the case of liaisons means the
IAB) was asked for comments, and sent some comments.

 >If there's some IETF vs W3C brouhaha on URNS vs
 >http URIs, let them sort it out.

There is definitely a tendency (by at least some people) in the W3C for
http URIs. There also seems to be some tendency (by at least some people)
in the IETF for URNs. But I definitely wouldn't call this a 'brouhaha'.

 >And if the IETF won't help with http: URI assignment, I bet the W3C would.

I cannot guarantee anything, but I guess we would at least favorably
consider such a request.

 >I idly wonder if you could use the RFC HTTP for the ns.

As such, that won't work, because there isn't a single canonical
(http) URI for RFCs. To take RFC 2396 as an example, there is at
least http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt and
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2396.txt. There are also
various mirrors.

Another issue is that the directory containing the RFC is already
really huge, adding more files in there doesn't seem like such
a good idea. But of course the idea that the RFC is available
from the namespace location is a very good one, and can easily
be realized once there is a http namespace.

Regards,    Martin.