# Re: The URN: wrapper and URLs...

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Fri, 15 Oct 93 17:41:30 +0100

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    Date: Fri, 15 Oct 93 17:41:30 +0100

    From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>

    Message-Id: <9310151641.AA00270@www3.cern.ch>

    To: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>

    Subject: Re: The URN: wrapper and URLs...

>From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
>Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1993 19:03:51 -0400

>absurdity of requiring that a line start with a TAB, but
>decided that his established user based was now too large
>to require them all to change their existing makefiles. At
>the time there were 16 users. The rest of us have been

When we had 16 users we made quite a lot of changes :-)

>Put another way, just because one or two systems currently
>use a non-conformant version of these things should _not_
>preclude us continuing our efforts to get them right.
>There are lots more systems coming and if we insist on
>preserving all prior art then our efforts on UR*s will
>simply be ignored by future developers.

I agree. But I also believe that if it ain't broken
you don't fix it just because you didn't invent it.

>There are lots more systems coming that will be using
>these things. For example, Bunyip will be announcing a new
>information service in the next few weeks (okay, maybe
>after Houston) that will have both Gopher and WWW front
>ends and that will support UR*s whereever possible.

Which is what all the WWW clients do. There are around 16
products, perhaps twice as many if you look at code under wraps.

> I know
>of several "real" publishing companies now working on their
>own online publishing systems that are candidates for
>these things. There are several companies I know working
>on commercial clients for the Internet. I admire what's
>been done to date but I also think there are some kludges
>and bogosities and we should be willing to not freeze
>things too early on this.

Fine, but you have yet to come up with something as serious
as a kludge.

>Let's not fool ourselves that we're anywhere near done
>with all of this or that the current nice first efforts
>define a standard that must be followed by everyone from
>now on.

This is a little like arguing about reinventing unix
because now we want to add graphics. We ought to be
able to leave URLs behind us as a base on which we
have built. If we keep arguing about punctuation
we will only delay the advance. Is that what you want
to do?

There is enough code code which needs writing, products which
need developing, for everyone to take a share, I hope.
____________________________________________________________

> God forbid that we should preserve that ridiculous and
> unnecessary double-/ syntax in the URNs as well! I don't
> object to making it optional to avoid breaking previous
> code, but it's such a blatant hack that it really offends
> my sense of artistic balance no end... :-(

This from the guy who introduced the double, triple and
quadruple colons, balanced by the string "URN" ???!!

> - peterd

Tim BL

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- Maybe in reply to: Michael Mealling: "The URN: wrapper and URLs..."
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