Re: Minutes, URLREG working group, Munich IETF, Aug 15 1997

Larry,

Thanks a lot for the most interesting minutes of URLREG in Munich.  My
current interest is in the telephone/fax URL schemes, and it was
interesting to learn that this particular family of schemes was so
much of a topic on the URLREG sessions in Munich, even though URLREG
is not specifically addressing (!) these schemes.

Did any people from ITU SG 16 participate in any discussions?  Who are
they and how can they be found?  If they read this, would they please
step forward?

I have not submitted any Internet draft myself, but I have been trying
to discuss with those who have.  Most of these discussions are
happening on the IETF-FAX mailing list, even though they are
discussing fax/phone numbers as part of e-mail addresses (their focus
is on e-mail to fax gateways) and not as part of an URL.  The mailto
URL scheme can serve as an intermediate.

I must admit I bailed out of the URL/URI/URN/UR-whatever discussions
sometimes in 1993/1994 because I just didn't see the point then.  To
me, URLs are addresses and not protocols, and those are two different
animals.  This is most obvious in the case of the mailto URL scheme,
where the user agent can chose to send mail by SMTP or UUCP or
whatever the user sees fit.  This scheme allows the encoding of an
address, not necessarily a prescription of a particular protocol.

Even though there are many ways to contact people (protocols), there
are only a few ways that people tell each other how they can be
contacted (addresses).  This is what they write on their business
cards, and you cannot fit too much text on these.  New communication
technologies whose addresses cannot fit on a business card might just
not be successful (see X.400).  The most common use of URLs is in the
<A HREF=...> attribute in HTML, i.e. links on homepages.  People
designing their own homepage must be able to understand how they
should write the URLs, and I think there is little point in designing
overly complex URL schemes.

Some telecom pointers, including references to URL scheme discussions,
that I have collected can be found on http://www.aronsson.se/tele.html


Lars Aronsson.
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