Hmm, if you want people to be able to link to Noms datasets on the web, maybe you should switch to using URLs to name the datasets, instead of a two-part identifier with an URL separated from a dataset name by a "::"? Darcs and Git seem to get by more or less with URLs and relative URLs; do you think that cold work for Noms too?

The super REST harmonious way to do this would be to define a new media-type for Noms databases with a smallish document that links to the component parts. Like torrent files, but using URLs (maybe relative URLs) instead of SHA1 hashes for the components, maybe?

This is a good point. We never thought of these strings as URLs, but there are places where it would be nice to use them that only want URLs (the href attribute, for example).

The way we have it now is nice in that any valid URL can be used to locate a database. I am loathe to restrict that.

Interesting point though - thank you!

Sure, I hope the ideas are useful! As some other commenters have said, if you just use # instead of ::, I think the problem goes away?

The hash portion of a URL is not transmitted to the server by browsers, so it wouldn't help in the case of putting the string into a URL bar or a hyperlink.

If the resource you're linking to is a database (or to speak more strictly, if its only representation is a resource of a noms-database media-type), rather than an HTML page or something, can't the browser can be configured to pass it off to a Noms implementation, complete with the dataset identifier within? I mean, that's what people do with page numbers in PDF files, right?

Hm. True.