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

Peter Deutsch (peterd@bunyip.com)
Thu, 14 Oct 1993 19:03:51 -0400

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    Message-Id: <9310142303.AA13190@expresso.bunyip.com>

    From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>

    Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1993 19:03:51 -0400

    In-Reply-To: Marc Andreessen's message as of Oct  8, 17:31

    To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen),

            Kevin Gamiel <kgamiel@vinca.cnidr.org>

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

[ You wrote: ]

> Kevin Gamiel writes:
. . .
> > Is it worth changing existing URL code? I would tend to vote yes (of
> > course I haven't written any URL code:-)
>
> It's too late.

I'm not sure I understand this comment. Are you saying
that because certain systems use code that doesn't support
the new format it's too late to get it right or make
changes?

If so, I would only remind you of the story told by the
guy who wrote the first "make". After finishing the first
release in one final all night burst of hacking, he turned
the code loose to the Bell Labs community and went home to
crash for a while. When he finally awoke and got back to
work a couple of days later, he was struck with the
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
cursing him ever since.

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.

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. 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.

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.

- peterd

    --

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