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w e a v i n g   t h e   w e b

I tried to explain at the session how important it was that the Web be seen as universal, but there was only so much time, and I decided not to waste my breath. I thought, What's in a name? If it went through the standards process and these people agreed, and all I needed was to call it uniform, as long as I got the right spec that was fine by me. I was willing to compromise so I could get to the technical details. So universal became uniform, and document became resource.

As it turns out, it had been important to nail down the name, because behind the name was the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of what the Web was trying to be. Ultimately, the group did decide to form a uniform resource identifier working group. However, they decided that identifier wasn't a good label for what the Web used. They wanted to emphasize that people could change the URIs when moving documents, and so they should be treated as some sort of transitive address. Locator was chosen instead, like a branding, a warning mark on the technology. I wanted to stick with identifier, because though in practice many URIs did change, the object was to make them as persistent as possible. We argued, but at the IETF the universal resource identifier became URL, the uniform resource locator. In years ahead the IETF community would use the URL acronym, allowing the use of the term URI for what was either a URL or something more persistent. I use the general term URI to emphasize the importance of universality, and of the persistence of information.

Progress in the URI working group was slow, partly due to the number of endless philosophical rat holes down which technical conversations would disappear. When years later the URI working group had to meet twelve times and still failed to agree on a nine-page document, John Klensin, the then IETF Applications Area director, was to angrily disband it. Sometimes there was a core philosophy being argued, and from my point of view that was not up for compromise. Sometimes there was a basically