Whence came 'URC'?

Daniel W. Connolly ([email protected])
Fri, 11 Mar 1994 17:59:29 --100


I just saw a blurb on 'Uniform Resource Citations' on the web...

>From "UR* and The Names and Addresses of WWW objects",
aka <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html>:

URC: Uniform Resource Citation. A set of attribute/value pairs
describing an object. Some of the values may be URIs of various kinds.
Others may include, for example, athorship, publisher, datatype, date,
copyright status and shoe size. Not normally discussed as a short
string, but a set of fields and values with some defined free
formatting.

[I'd also suggest: MD5 signature, Message-ID, etc.]

What discussion forum did this come from?

I think this is the critical facility in all this Open Hypermedia
stuff... URI's are a key part, but they're mostly just distributed
filesystem techniques. URC's are the key to reliable, links that
degrade gracefully.

Uniform Citations (I called them "references" in past postings)
are the key... This is probably where HyTime ideas will be most
applicable and valuable. I certainly hope URC's will be expressible in
HyTime (even if they are usually expressed in some more convenent
syntax...)

Dan