Jeni's Musings

"...a set of URIs that are explicitly intended to be used as unique identifiers..."

"If you request one of these URIs, ..., you will get some information about that bit of legislation..."

Sorry, I realise this is, at best, very tangential to your main point but I really think doing a request on a URI should either return a representation of the resource or should redirect to information about the resource. It shouldn't return a representation of something else (e.g., information about the original resource). I think it's an abuse of the content negotiation mechanism to use it to distinguish between a request for a resource and a request for metadata about that resource.

On the other hand, I don't have a better suggestion. I first asked the TAG about this a while ago:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007Aug/0075.html

and they seem to have recently decided it's something worth talking about:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/62

Still, I'm not going to hold my breath.