Re: [Uri-review] ws: and wss: schemes

["Daniel R. Tobias" <[e-mail]>]

On 8 Sep 2009 at 17:14, David Booth wrote:

> You seem to have missed the point.  A string like
> "http://websockets.net/" is not *intrinsically* tied to the Web Sockets
> protocol any more than the string "wss: is.  It only becomes tied to the
> Web Sockets protocol if the social entity that has the *authority* to
> decree such a link does so.  In the case of "wss:", that authority
> belongs to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).  In the case
> of "http://websockets.net/" that authority belongs to the owner of
> websockets.net.  (See Architecture of the World Wide Web section
> 2.2.2.1:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#def-uri-ownership )
> The principle is *exactly* the same.  

Not really, to me at least.  That would be like saying that because 
you own that particular horse, you can declare its tail to be a leg 
even if the general community of experts in horses and biology in 
general have a definition of legs that it doesn't meet.

Since I own the dan.info domain, I get to define what any particular 
URI within it (or its subdomains), like http://dan.info/FooBarBaz/ or 
http://foo.bar.baz.dan.info/Some.Silly.Stuff, resolves to under the 
HTTP protocol (or whatever other protocol might be referenced in the 
URI scheme, like https://dan.info/Something.Else or 
ftp://dan.info/OtherJunk/).  I can make it resolve to a picture of 
me, a picture of a horse, a political rant, a redirect to a different 
URI, a 404 Not Found error, or not resolve at all because the 
hostname has no DNS record. It doesn't, however, give me the right or 
power to insist that the definition of the "http" scheme or its 
associated protocol doesn't apply to my URIs, and instead those 
particular URIs should be resolved using my own "FooBarBaz" protocol.

Even if the page that is retrieved under a HTTP fetch of the document 
at the URI says "This URI is intended to be resolved under FooBarBaz 
instead of HTTP", that doesn't make it so, any more than writing 
"This sentence is written in French" makes it be in French instead of 
English.


-- 
== Dan ==
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