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Comment by jffry | Hacker News Reader

1998 [1] although the "URI working group" was active in 1994 describing URNs [2] and URLs [3]. There were also URCs [4] which never took off [5]

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2396

[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1737

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1737

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Characteristi...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name#URIs,_UR...

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The Wikipedia page on URIs has examples that look a lot like URLs. Seems it's trying to say that URLs are only for WWW addresses, but Postgres refers to things like "jdbc:postgresql://host:port/database" as URLs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.4/jdbc19100.htm

Or maybe the presence of host:port qualifies it as a URL.

The only difference between a URI and URL is semantic - URLs point to resources over a network, URIs point to resources that could be anywhere. Colloquially they're used interchangeably.

A URL is a URI.

A URI (indicator) is a unique reference to a resource, of some kind.

One type of URI is a URN (name), e.g. doi:10.5281/ZENODO.31780 - a unique name for a resource, but no instructions on how to obtain it

Another type of URI is a URL (location), e.g. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.31780 - same resource in this case, but now we know we can obtain it via the HTTPS protocol

Few people call the address in the web browser a "URI" any more, even though technically it is one. Your JDBC URL is a URL, as is "mailto:president@whitehouse.gov" or "tel:+44-118-999-881-999-119-7253"

I get what they were going for here, but ehhh, the only useful designation is URL. And even acknowledging that URIs exist, it's overly broad to refer to http://... as one. I remember seeing "URI" a lot some ObjC libraries to refer to URLs, it was just confusing.

> the only useful designation is URL

Yup, URNs were part of the "semantic web" craze, so you could e.g. record facts about a book with isbn: scheme URNs. Nothing much consequential ever came from all that committee busywork, but people got to pontificate and sound smart talking about reification and so on. I still wonder who paid for all of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Seems like URNs fit into the XML/XMPP/SOAP genre, old bloated stuff. For some reason there had to be a whole fad for people to realize you can just shove data into JSON and it's good enough.

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