On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 9:06 AM <persist at localhost> (really??) wrote:
Of course it's somewhat breaking away from a paradigm, but I strongly feel
> that consistent support for URNs in preference to URLs in electronic
> documents will further the reach of hypertext beyond the always online
> crowd, by introducing a layer of indirection that greatly simplifies
> eliminating single points of failure the URL-cross-referenced documents are
> infamous for, contributing to the perception that electronic resources must
> be transient.
>
In practice, given the existence of doi.org and similar systems, as well as
URL shorteners (I often use them to generate de facto URNs), and the fact
that HTTP and Gemini both allow protocol-level redirection, I think what we
have is as good as it's going to get. DNS is the most successful and
widespread federated database system in the world, and attempting to
replace it is likely to be a pipe dream. Link rot is a thing, but so is
database rot and protocol rot. As the French proverb has it, "tout passe,
tout lasse, tout casse et tout se remplace" (Everything passes, everything
grows weary, everything breaks, and everything gets replaced).
And I say this as a person who has dealt with SGML/XML public ids and URNs,
and even wrote RFC 3305 to define a mapping from the former to the latter.
It's a dead end. Of course, I'm certainly open to the idea that my
conclusions were premature, but the burden of persuasion is on you. I know
the merits of stable names, you needn't convince me of that. You need at
least a sketch of a system that is clearly superior to URLs as we know them
today.
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org
Your worships will perhaps be thinking that it is an easy thing
to blow up a dog? [Or] to write a book?
--Don Quixote, Introduction
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