Agree with John. All that is solid melts into air? John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> writes: > 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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