New opportunities for linked data nose-following is a blog post from the W3C about three (3) new IETF RFCs.
Well, or at least two of them. As of my 8:55 PM local, 2010-07-08, “Defining Well-Known URIs” has the following URI, http://www.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-site-meta-05. Err, that doesn’t look right.
When it didn’t resolve I thought perhaps it was a redirect.
Nothing that complicated, just a bad URI. I got the IETF “404: Page Not Found” page.
Oh, the correct URI? Defining Well-Known URIs, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5785.txt.
So, what is a well-known URI?
A well-known URI is a URI [RFC3986] whose path component begins with
the characters “/.well-known/”, and whose scheme is “HTTP”, “HTTPS”,
or another scheme that has explicitly been specified to use well-
known URIs.
Applications that wish to mint new well-known URIs MUST register
them, following the procedures in Section 5.1.
Wait for it….
5.1. The Well-Known URI Registry
This document establishes the well-known URI registry.
Well-known URIs are registered on the advice of one or more
Designated Experts (appointed by the IESG or their delegate), with a
Specification Required (using terminology from [RFC5226]). However,
to allow for the allocation of values prior to publication, the
Designated Expert(s) may approve registration once they are satisfied
that such a specification will be published.
Well, that’s a relief! We are going to have Designated Expert(s) sitting in judgment over “well-known” URIs.
We just narrowly escaped being able to judge for ourselves what are URIs worth treating as “well-known” or not.
Good thing we have TBL, the W3C and Designated Experts to keep us safe.
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Update: 2010-07-09
I was worried that since the “Defining Well-known URIs” RFC was dated in April that this was some complicated spoof or joke. I even check the cross linking in the RFC but finally erred on saying it was real.
I had that judgment confirmed this morning by learning that the page “went dark” briefly last night and when I checked it this morning, the incorrect URL that I reported above has been corrected, silently.
W3C blog, goes dark, comes back with correct information, all signs that this must be genuine. Or at least it is being reported as such.