> A lot of standards replaced “URL” with “URI” I've seen this argument before—that URLs came first—and it's junk. The accusation of URIs as a retcon is itself

> A lot of standards replaced “URL” with “URI” I've seen this argument before—that URLs came first—and it's junk. The accusation of URIs as a retcon is itself a retcon. First, even if we grant all of your premises, the fact that URLs are URIs contradicts the entire argument. Secondly, it was always about identifiers. Not making any appearance in TBL's "Information Management: A Proposal" is the term URL (and neither does "locator", nor the related term "address"). URLs wouldn't appear for years. What he does spend time discussing, though—from the very beginning—are names, i.e., identifiers. By 1992, and before the first URL RFC appeared, TBL is writing about "UDIs"–Universal Document Identifiers. In fact, the agreement to work on URLs was an agreement that was made during an IETF BOF session called... "Universal Document Identifiers BOF"—using the same terminology as TBL's UDI memo. But even all this minutiae is beside the point; none of this even matters, since... > rather than principally direct locators[...] I think you are the first person I’ve seen who has zealously adopted the idea You have to be misreading me. What offense of zealotry have I committed here that doesn't comport with closely held values of admirers and beneficiaries of URLs? The entire point of the message you responded to is that I want the link <https://mitpress.mit.edu/Licklider,%20J.%20C.%20R.%20(1965).%20Libraries%20of%20the%20future.%20Cambridge,%20MA:%20MIT%20Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/Licklider,%20J.%20C.%20R.%20(1965)....> to work. That's an identifier _and_ a URL (not least of all because all URLs _are_ identifiers). If you somehow think I'd be happy if it functioned as a URI without also exhibiting the properties we've come to expect of URLs (live ones, that is)—e.g. that it might be true that after poking it into the your browser, it doesn't actually do anything—then you have greatly misunderstood me and missed the point entirely. It needs to be able to resolve, using existing URL-supporting client software (commodity browsers, etc.) An identifier that does not function as a locator—one that doesn't "contain enough information to allow the document or index to which it refers to be accessed" as TBL wrote in 1992—is simply not an implementation of what I wrote out in the previous message.