# Re: Roy's remarks

Roy Fielding (fielding@beach.w3.org)
Mon, 17 Jul 1995 14:39:50 -0400

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    Message-Id: <199507171839.OAA22469@beach.w3.org>

    To: Leslie Daigle <leslie@bunyip.com>

    Subject: Re: Roy's remarks

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 17 Jul 1995 04:51:37 EDT."

                 <199507170851.EAA11425@beethoven.bunyip.com>

    Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 14:39:50 -0400

    From: Roy Fielding <fielding@beach.w3.org>

First off, let me apologize for my earlier remarks -- they were
both too abrupt for an e-mail message and poorly conceived. I did not
have any intention of saying that what you are doing with URAs
and resource discovery/management is not worthwhile. In fact, I would
be quite happy seeing it investigated by an IETF WG -- just not URI.

Whether or not it is reflected in the agenda/schedule/milestones,
the presence of additional goals will hinder progress. People are
not good at multitasking, and mailing list discussions get lost
in the noise.

I believe that it was worth an all-out attempt to prevent this WG
from sliding further into the abyss. If I have failed in that,
then so be it -- at least I made the attempt. I will have no further
comment on the charter or the scope of the WG.

Ron is correct in saying that I was ignoring the role of bibliographic
citations as identifiers. Perhaps it would be useful if we placed some
bounds on the semantics of URCs, such that they can be considered an
identifier for a resource (those bounds are certainly not present in
the current crop of drafts).

>I am sorry, however, that you will not be here for the URI-WG meeting where
>I hope to do a 10 minute presentation of an Internet application that is NOT
>WWW, and yet uses URIs... there is a much bigger Internet world out there
>than just the WWW....

:) The WWW does not equal Mosaic/Netscape. The WWW does not consist of
only "point-and-shoot" interfaces. The WWW *is* the combined technologies
of hypertext (HTML, Java, and eventually other syntaxes), network data
transfer (HTTP, gopher, wais, ftp, ...), and uniform addressing (URIs),
along with common tools for serving information and retrieving information.

If you use URIs, then you have created an application of the WWW.
Welcome to the club -- it is not intended to be exclusive. At some
point we will need to have a philosophical discussion about what is
and what is not an identifier.

....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
(fielding@w3.org) (fielding@ics.uci.edu)

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