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Ditch URL. Uniform Resource Names ftw!

persist at localhost persist at localhost

Sun Sep 27 13:48:14 BST 2020

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I'm searching for the like-minded people that agree that URL syntax for hyperlinks means desperately clinging to the mistakes of the past. It seems that in a world of rapidly expanding browser scope some fundamentals are set in stone even for known violators. And the current opposition seems to be all ...return to the Tim Berners-Lee era of the WWW. As if few to none want to go further than attempting a reaction to certain annoyances and privacy encroachments that the Web has, without considering the features the Web never realized.

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.

And I'm not saying it's good to base on a legacy URN specification that obeys RFC3986 either, as evidenced by the mess that magnet: URIs present because of ugly percent encoding.