RE: URL Getting started

From: Tristan Louis (
Date: Mon, Oct 12 1998

From: "Tristan Louis" <>
To: <>, "'Philipp Hoschka'" <>, <>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 13:50:05 -0400
Message-ID: <004b01bdf608$be743520$>
Subject: RE: URL Getting started

> I've volunteered to take a stab at writing a document on TV-oriented URL
> schemes.  I happen to be already working on a revision to my original
> IETF Internet-Draft on "tv:", so the timing works out well to bring this
> into the interest group.
> It sounds to me like there's probably more than one URL scheme needed
> anyway: there's a generic URL for TV broadcasts that is transport
> independent (like "tv:") and then there are probably several
> transport-specific schemes (like "dvb:").  The first is more like a
> resource name than a locator (describing a given broadcast stream,
> rather than explaining where to find it), whereas the second class of
> schemes are true resource locators.
This looks interesting. How about, however, building on top of it to try to
reach a single tag that would have the transport scheme defined as a
variable in the URL. I'm thinking of a scheme along the following lines:



TV	identifies this URL as related to a TV broadcast

SRC	identifies the source of data to be passed to the device. We might want
to start discussing the creation of an XML-based DTD for TVML (TV Markup
Language) that would pass data such as transitions and screen positioning
(if I remember well, WebTV has already presented some basic elements related
to this)

BTYPE	identifies the broadcast type. Variables include:

		DBS: Direct Broadcasting Satellite
		DTH: Direct To Home, such as reception through regular antenna
		CABLE: Cable Television
		FIXED: Transmission using fixed media such as VCR tapes, DVD discs,
laserdiscs or other types of media where the broadcast can be replayed.

NETID	identifies the station. I would opt for the following scheme to
identifies 	this:

		1 network
		2 station
		3 area
		4 channel

As such, NETID would give all the information related to a station or a set
of stations. For example, if you are dealing with CNN, coming out of
Atlanta, US, the NETID would be NETID="cnn.main" If, on the other hand, you
had to deal with CNN Headline News, you would get NETID="cnn.headlinenews"
And finally, if you only wanted to broadcast to CNN Headline News viewers in
New York, you would get NETID="cnn.headlinenews.ny" or, if you wanted to
address people in New York who watched CNN Headline News on channel 10, you
would get NETID="cnn.headlinenews.ny.10"

I realize, however, that we need to define a standard way to define area.
What I would suggest, when it comes to this, is that we use the TLD names
defined by the IANA as a way to breakdown area, with countries being defined
by their TLD and American states being defined as us_state, where state is
the US State (for example, New York would be us_ny )

Ideas, thoughts, problems with this scheme?


Tristan Louis
Pencom Web Works