# going too far?

Karen R. Sollins (sollins@lcs.mit.edu)
Mon, 28 Nov 1994 13:37:11 -0500

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    Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 13:37:11 -0500

    Message-Id: <199411281837.NAA15517@lysithea.lcs.mit.edu>

    From: "Karen R. Sollins" <sollins@lcs.mit.edu>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: going too far?

I am concerned. We need to walk a fine line. I don't think we have
stepped over it, but I see us inching closer to it, and we need to
understand better where the boundary is. The problem is actually 2
problems. First there is the question of how much background material
needs to be in a document vs. how much the author can assume readers
will either know or learn if they feel the need or interest. (For
that we provide references in our documents.) Second, there is the
problem of availability of the documents.. Consider each problem
separately.

About how much should be in a document. For at least some audience
probably larger than 1 but not the whole world, or even the whole IETF
membership, in general one should not need to read references to
understand the gist of a paper (internet draft). But there may be
cases even there. For esoteric details of the frutzel transport
protocol I will certainly need to read the spec if I want to know them
- I simply don't know them all, off-hand. I might also trust certain
people in the community to represent the fruzel prototol fairly to me,
but even so, I expect them to give me hints as to why they might take
a particular position on how to caste frutzel addresses into URLs.
For someone coming new to the working group or a student of mine who
wants to join this fray, there will be perhaps more background reading
in order to fully understand the documents being circulated in our
group.

Now, comes the question of where to find the description I need to
understand the frutzel transport protocol. By providing URLs we are
now doing something that is different from what we have traditionally
provided for readers. Traditionally, references provided an
identifier that allowed the reader to resolve it in some local,
context sensitive way, but provided an identifier that was extremely
long-lived (think about URNs here:-). We now see a move toward
providing location information in potentially long-lived documents (eg
published in journals and magazines and probably books, but especially
online documents). We of all people ought to understand that that is
a bad idea. We should *NEVER* be putting URLs into documents. We are
misusing URLs in ways that having for the last year at least been
causing people outside our community to believe that we don't
understand why they shouldn't be used as long-lived identifiers. We
must work extremely hard to eradicate that behavior first in
ourselves, and hopefully in the community at large.

For the present we don't have some widely accepted way to provide
locators (ie translation services, URC storage and provision services,
whatever you want to call it - the things that translate long-lived
identifiers, URNs, into locations, URLs).

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