[ih] URl construct

[John Curran]

On Jul 3, 2012, at 7:40 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> What makes this a more interesting topic is that the design of the URL meta-construct has essentially permitted the Web to coopt all other independent work.  

That's very much an IETF creation... it started at the March 1992 IETF San 
Diego living documents BoF & X.500/WAIS/WWW BoF.   We had the archie, gopher, 
prospero, and www folks all agree that a single uniform reference for digital 
objects was needed, and that led to formation of the URI working group and 
Uniform Resource Locator (RFC 1738).

Of course, any attempt to have only digital objects in URLs (and keep things 
like logical names and embedded queries up in Uniform Resource Names) then 
failed due to lack of self-control combined with insufficient running code.
There were solid efforts to create a viable system of namespaces and meta-
namespaces, but concerns about latency from another layer of redirection and 
arguments over authority caused delays in actual implementation and then 
abandonment.  The end result is that http servers became more agile and 
including providing sufficient logical name mapping functionality locally 
to any service/application you wished to configured, not just hypertext
retrieval.

> While that's useful, it also misleading in terms of protocol and format innovation and development.
> 
> That is, the ability of a URL to encompass independent services is really the benefit I meant to point to, with the the list of 3 points (above.)  But the result has also been confusion about architectural boundaries.

It was never the intent.  Useful tools are applied to many problems, 
even those for which they are ill-suited.

FYI,
/John