Message-Id: <9410050951.AA24239@plato.ansa.co.uk>
To: uri@bunyip.com
Subject: Re: No "TOP" of the docuverse [Was: URC usage scenarios ]
In-Reply-To: Message from jolt!avatar@jolt.mpx.com.au of Wed, 05 Oct 1994
<m0qsB3y-0005tXC@jolt.mpx.com.au>
Date: Wed, 05 Oct 1994 10:51:22 BST
From: Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>
jolt!avatar@jolt.mpx.com.au writes:
> Of course you can, as long as you also supply the necessary context. In this
> proposal, a host which the URL is expressed relative to. The URLs are then
> still globally unique since they can only be compared after having been
> transformed into their canonical form - ie relative to the current host.
In this case, the (or rather a) URN for the resource is the global name for
the host plus the name relative to that host. This assumes that hosts have
global names, which is just a smaller version of the initial problem, but not
an essentially different problem.
This also means that every resource gets as many URNs as there are hosts that
are aware of it. I think that it is better to reuse an existing URN wherever
possible. This strategy also pushes the problem into an area where the
internet domain name in a PTR record for an IP address is not close to being a
global name for the host - resource and name servers are usually named and on
relatively stable IP address, at least as compared with the growing community
of hosts that are allocated IP addresses from a pool when they dial in.
Regards,
Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>
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