On Jan 25, 2004, at 6:38 PM, Joe English wrote:

> Hey, it's not *our* fault the people in charge
> of making the normative definitions don't believe
> in the difference between names and addresses :-)

I have not found the distinction to be very clear logically or 
philosophically, nor particularly useful operationally.

> I'm with Simon and Hendrik: "URL" is a more precise
> term than "URI", even if it's not officially defined
> in an RFC.

I'm a computer programmer.  I like to have normative specifications.  
Please either write or reference the normative specifications.  For 
example, when you say "URL" does that exclude URNs?  I think it does, 
but you need to be sure.  On the other hand, I suspect that you'd be 
happy with some "ftp:" URIs.  Does it exclude 
http://www.tbray.org/no-steenkin-data-here because I *guarantee* that 
an attempt to dereference will return a 404?  Does it include 
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/02/29/  which will very 
likely have useful content five weeks from now, but doesn't now?  If 
you want to *require* that something be a URL, you need to be clear 
about what you mean by that.  -Tim

smime.p7s