Re: Generic Tagging: A Modest Proposal

From: Timothy Partridge (timpart@perdix.demon.co.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 15 1997 - 14:55:43 EDT


John Cowan said:
> Kenneth Whistler said
> > 3. Rather than introducing a completely generic public
> > tag scheme, with a path characters, reversed domain
> > names, and then arbitrary tags per domain, we concluded
> > that there was really only a clamor for a couple of
> > kinds of tags: language tags and character source set
> > tags. Maybe one or two others might be useful. So we
> > introduced particular tag types rather than a completely
> > open mechanism.
...
> As Michael Everson has said several times, 10646 should
> last for centuries: if people have only clamored for
> two types of tags so far, that is because we are
> essentially in the pre-implementation phase still.
> When Unicode/10646 is really pervasive, new types of
> meta-information will be popping out of the woodwork
...

Agreed.
What is wrong with a URL style of tag where the tag type comes
at the start followed by a colon? The syntax of the rest of the
tag then depends on the tag type.
E.g. in URLs http: and mailto: have different syntaxes.
All we need is a "start of tag" character and a defined syntax for
tag type. We can then add new types with their own syntaxes as
needed and maintain compatibility so that new types can be ignored
by software that doesn't understand them.

Is there going to be a Private tag type?

   Tim

-- 
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer



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