Re: [apps-discuss] FW: New Version Notification for draft-lanthaler-profile-registry-01.txt

["Markus Lanthaler" <[e-mail]>]

On Thursday, April 18, 2013 5:39 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On the average, something like this is best done when motivated by some
> specific needs for its capabilities, rather than as an abstract
> exercise.
> 
> So my own question is:  what profiles are needed immediately?

That's a good point. The JSON-LD specification [1], which is now in Last
Call at W3C, e.g., defines three profile URIs. Since it is being defined at
W3C, it also uses URIs in W3C's URI space. AFAIK, nothing comparable
(URI-space-wise) exists for RFCs. The profile link relation was approved
just recently and media type definitions are already beginning to include
profile parameters following its semantics [1], [2], [3], [4] (or are being
re-registered to do so).

I think the potential gain of reserving some URN space for this to enable
standards to mint unambiguous and, more importantly, stable identifiers far
outweighs the potential harm it might do. In fact, I can't see any potential
"harm" apart from "wasting" one URN sub-namespace if it doesn't get adopted.

This may not answer your question directly. We are a bit in a
chicken-and-egg situation here. Obviously profiles can't make use of such an
URN before the sub-namespace is established. Nevertheless, I think this I-D
represents an important piece to ensure that profiles can be used to build
interoperable and evolvable solutions. It is similar to media types: nothing
"breaks" if you use proprietary ones but you will lose a lot of advantages
by doing so. In these instances, centralization is a feature.

I hope this clarifies the motivation behind this effort. If not, please let
me know and I'll try my best to respond to your concerns.


Cheers,
Markus



[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/#application-ld-json
[2] http://amundsen.com/media-types/collection/format/
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kelly-json-hal
[4] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wilde-atom-profile


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler