JBENNY the original article seems to have disappeared, I have some preliminary discussion from
September 2004, a submission was sent to W3.org, but no replies.
You are absolutely right it should be a standard, strictly speaking it is not owned by anyone, as I placed the idea in the public domain. Lestec.com.au merely got it working and now has some plans of using it in the future - but as a simple method it would benefit by being made into a standard.
I would avoid MS implementation, besides which they seemed to have done nothing with it.
The implementation is so simple I am amazed no-one has created it elsewhere.
The only thing that could go wrong is non-standard uses that look like WUIDs and end up with the chance of reproducing the same ID.
I will ask Lestec if we can produce a simple free generator and some documentation soon and notify the forum when it is available (they are in the middle of something right at thw moment).
This is stupid, but how would we go about making it a standard - any suggestions?
In terms of publishing I have come up with my own little system two WUIDs:
1) a EID that is an edition ID.
2) a WID a work or Title ID.
A WID needs a public listing, Ie "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells has a single WID that is used by anyone in any language that produces the work in anyform so long as the text stems directly from the work.
The EID identifies the particular rendition.
Given these two bits of information any work produced any where can be unambiguously referenced even if the particular edition cannot be found, the work could be.
Other information such as the language, the publisher's name and edition numbers etc.,. can be read from headers, along with the actual title and author, original publication date.
ISBN numbers work well enough for printed works, but with the possibilities of epublishing, we need something that is more flexible and guarantees unique identity.
Other WUIDs identifying everything from authors, to publishers may be useful and should over time become standardized INMO.
If people think in general this is a good Idea, I could write a submission to the .epud/IDEF. I am, however, new to the forum and this whole side of things, and need a little longer to perfect (shorten) the system, ideally, a simple server based script would make it available to anyone, while convincing servers to have load the script would ensure more than enough bandwidth for widespread usage.