On 5/8/09, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@sun.com> wrote:
On May 7, 2009, at 3:45 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
We were talking before about all URLs appearing in the protocol, which does make a lot of sense. UUIDs are universally unique already are resolveable if not retrievable from the entry point that served them, and don't break when moved or shared. There are pros and cons of both approaches bit I think we need to understand the full implications before we decide one way or the other.
[Trying not to get hauled into the thick of OCCI design...]
Actually, if you have a protocol and there's a place where you're going to identify things with URIs (which is a good thing), the best practice is not to constrain the URI scheme. Just say it's a URI. There are people who are going to want to use URNs or "tag:" URIs or whatever, for reasons that seem good to them. I almost always disagree with those people and think that in general HTTP URIs are the way to go for almost everything, but if the usability of the protocol depends on the choice of URI scheme, that's usually a symptom of a problem. -Tim
This is a good point... I wonder what the implications are for interoperability - UUID based URNs do make a hell of a lot of sense for this environment. Oh and before I forget, so I wanted to release OCCI under CC with a view to pulling directly from Sun, Google, etc. but it was shaping up to be a battle with the OGF board. May revisit the question with them later. CC licenses exclude trademarks and patents so in addition to copyright there's trademark and patent protecion for us to think about (Sun's TM is less of an issue but not sure there was a patent license/pledge for it). That said it's amazon who appear to be the resident experts on IP problems. Sam on iPhone