This is wrong according to the URI RFC, which the author cites: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-1.1.1
The following example URIs illustrate several URI schemes and
variations in their common syntax components:
ftp://ftp.is.co.za/rfc/rfc1808.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
ldap://[2001:db8::7]/c=GB?objectClass?one
mailto:John.Doe@example.com
news:comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
tel:+1-816-555-1212
telnet://192.0.2.16:80/
urn:oasis:names:specification:docbook:dtd:xml:4.1.2
So now we have a URL spec from WHATWG that says URI is an old term for URLs, and a URI spec from the IETF that says that URL is just a term for a certain subset of URIs.
This is the more broadly accepted definition, right?
The obvious counterexample to this is the mailto: URI scheme. It has no location but it is still a useful thing to link to on the web.
The term I would use is "a distinction without a difference", but they're not entirely wrong.
WhatWG wasn't wrong.....
I: Identifier, is an identifier. "Oh, that's a [a thing, or a location]."
N: Name, tells what the thing is. "Oh, that's the Sears Tower."
L: Locator, tells how to get to something. "Oh, that's at 233 S. Wacker Drive Chicago, Illinois 60606"
That was the second example to come into my head (the first was the Bank of America building in San Francisco), and I think it speaks to things that both* examples have changed their names! The Sears Tower is now the "Willia Tower", and the "Bank of America Center" is now "555 California Street".
And even place names don't stay the same! In 2019, Stanford University renamed "Serra Mall" to "Jane Stanford Way": addresses changed; building names did not.
Just goes to show why it's so important to implement redirects, and (in HTTP at least) why the "301 Moved Permanently" response code exists.
I was under the impression that a URN is an identifier that is not tied to a specific location, in fact it could apply to a resource that exists at many different ones. Is the "Sears Tower" example (or anything that could reasonably be associated with a single location) really the best in this case?
urn:catalogue.isbn.org:1234
You could use a URL for information about the book as the URN for the book itself? Or is that “bad” because in 25 years we might not use either https or DNS? https://isbn.org/catalogue/1234
If the URN is a kind of type prefix for an otherwise meaningless number, are we supposed to use these inline / Hungarian notation types everywhere the number is used?: https://amazon.com/books/urn:isbn:1234/purchase
I ended up using this for XML namespaces.
Even if the nomenclature was "URL" they still wouldn't necessarily accept all URLs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_Resource_Ide...
My only exposure was folks using it to gloss over what could have been expressed in 7 bit clean ascii if you knew the codepage it had been encoded with.
I apologize for the mischaracterization of legitimate use.