[Opensim-dev] Global identifiers

[James Stallings II]

Hi All, Serendepity :)

I think you may be working your way around to the distinction here between
the URI and the URL. The one being necessarily an identifier and the other a
locator. Both are useful, but the distinction exists precisely because they
are not the same sort of thing; perforce, a URL is not to be used where a
URI is indicated, and a URI is the necessarily 'immutable' part of a URL.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the way I have always
thought of it.

Cheers :)
James
SimHost.com


On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Serendipity Seraph <sseraph at me.com> wrote:

>  On 8/29/10 11:45 AM, Dahlia Trimble wrote:
> > This looks to me to be an attempt to provide local caching of relevant
> > information for reducing lookup requirements and seems a usable
> > approach as long as the extra data is known to be non-authoritative.
> > It does bring a implementation-specific form into something that has
> > potential to becoming a standard of sorts and that may be a concern.
> > It does not appear to address the problem of fly-by-night service
> > providers or those who may try to profit excessively from a position
> > of providing an authority. Personally I don't like the idea of having
> > a paid subscription service having any control over my ability to surf
> > the hypergrid, and as such I''d prefer to see the UUID portion be the
> > authoritative lookup key and the lookup domain portion be considered a
> > suggestion at best. UUIDs by design have sufficient variability where
> > collisions are highly unlikely so I don't see collisions as being an
> > issue even if they are independently generated by independent providers.
> IMHO, all references should always be to a key type that is by
> definition not prone to collision.  UUIDs were designed for this
> purpose.  That does leave what user name and whatever a UUID maps to.
> Caching the mapping with something like memcache should be possible.
> Stuffing possibly mutable [and/or collision prone] data  into URIs
> (effectively pointers) or other identifiers is a bad idea.  Identifiers
> are not supposed to be meaning or semantic bearing.
>
> - s
>
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