uid-brainstorming
UID Brainstorming
This page is for brainstorming about ideas, proposals, constraints, requirements for a UID microformat.
Authors
- Tantek Çelik
- Ed Summers
Experience
- a microformat for indicating something *is* an identifier rather than the solved problem of providing a microformat *for* identifiers (RFC 2396)
Goals Requirements
- a method of publishing an asserted globally unique identifier for a piece of content or a referenced item
Thoughts
UIDs that are URLs
It seems like in the 80% case (perhaps 99.99% case on the Web), a UID is going to be a URL, thus a common pattern will likely be things like:
<a class="url uid" href="http://example.com/contentspace/somenumber">the item</a>
Should rather than Must
A UID *should* rather than *must* be a URL. The UID microformat will ordinarily be a URL, but it should be flexible enough to allow it to contain non-network resolvable URIs.
UID + URL -> permalink?
Can you infer that if something is a URL and a UID that it is also a permalink? It seems so. I can't think of any semantic of "permalink" that isn't covered by the union of the semantics of URL and UID.
abbr pattern
Use the abbr-design-pattern to allow identifiers to be more fully described.
<abbr class="uid" title="urn:isbn:0950788120">0 9507881-2-0</abbr>
Proposals
Just use UID from hCard
- Tantek proposed that we see if we can reuse uid from hCard, similar to how we have reused geo and adr from hCard.
create a URI microformat
- Xiaoming proposed leaving UID intact in hcalendar and hcard, because
whatever written in rfc2426/rfc2445 and their examples cannot be easily changed, and they seem to work well with hcalendar/hcard.
Instead a new "URI" microformat should be established for the purpose of indicating something *is* an identifier in general.In this case you can easily reference URI RFC and no further elaboration about persistence/resovlable/uniqueness, because these issues are addressed by various URI specifications.
References
See Also
- RFC 2396 Uniform Resource Identifiers
- RFC 4452 the "info" URI scheme for information assets with identifiers in public namespaces.
- COinS for putting attaching openurl context objexts to a span.
- unAPI has a technique for embedding IDs in html so that they can be retrieved from an unAPI service.
- Tag URI an algorithm that lets people mint identifiers that no one else using the same algorithm could ever mint.
- IANA URN Namespaces - RFC2141, RFC3406
- IANA Uniform Resource Identifer (URI) Schemes