WPub Identifiers and Locators
Space for creating definitions and draft text about identifiers and locators pertinent to development of the Web Publications draft specification. Please add content as appropriate. Create new issues in this GitHub repository to raise questions and concerns or offer alternative interpretations. Put more general, non WPub-specific notes about identifiers and locators in the Working Group's home repository wiki's page on this topic.
Including here candidate definitions for the terminology section of specification as well as working definitions helpful to developing and refining our ideas about identifiers and locators in the context of a Web Publication.
IRI
- An IRI, or Internationalized Resource Identifier, is an extension to the URI specification to allow characters from Unicode, whereas URIs must be made up of a subset of ASCII characters. There is a mapping algorithm for translating between IRIs and the equivalent encoded URI form. IRIs are defined by [rfc3987].
Web Publication identifier
- Persistently and unambiguously identifies a Web Publication
- Identifies exactly one Web Publication - i.e., cannot be reused to identify a different Web Publication (or anything else)
- Has global scope, consistent with the description of identification provided in the W3C Recommendation: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One [webarch]
locator
- A dereferenceable IRI that can be used to locate and retrieve a Web Publication or any part of a Web Publication.
Web Publication canonical identifier
- The singular preferred identifier for a Web Publication provided at time of publication
- If not also a locator, it must be possible to make a 1-to-1 mapping of a canonical identifier to a locator that can be used to retrieve the Web Publication manifest
- Canonical identifiers are persistent and immutable (although the mapping to locators may be dynamic)
- When published a Web Publication must be assigned exactly one canonical identifier. This canonical identifier must be unique to the Web Publication and must be included in the Web Publication manifest. The canonical identifier does not preclude other identifiers and/or locators being assigned at publication or subsequently.
- The canonical identifier should be an IRI (and therefore also a locator). If the canonical identifier is not an IRI, it must be possible to make a 1-to-1 mapping of the canonical identifier to a locator.
- When dereferenced or mapped to a locator, the canonical identifier must enable the retrieval of the manifest for a Web Publication.
- The locator associated with a canonical identifier does not preclude the creation and use of other locators to retrieve a representation of a Web Publication in whole or part.
- The canonical identifier must persistently and unambiguously identify all instantiations of a Web Publication.
[webarch] Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One. Ian Jacobs; Norman Walsh. W3C. 15 December 2004. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
[rfc3987] Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). M. Duerst; M. Suignard. IETF. January 2005. Proposed Standard. URL: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987