So in hindsight it's a bit unfortunate that Standards.URI wasn't made a pmod with a Standards.URI.URI inside it instead.
In hinder still hindsight, it's a bit unfortunate that the Pike module and class system makes this the proper way of solving the issue of how to add stand-alone methods related to a problem domain of some class, but where a class instance isn't necessarily always around. It's a bit counter-intuitive and silly-looking until you understand the internals of the language.
Whether it smells better or worse than modules sporting a `() method to return class instances is of course also a matter of taste; that's a tradeoff between pretty interface names and pretty or even useful at all type information, IIRC? (At least from what I understand, that would make the module name useless as a type for the class returned.) Are there other problems with using `() methods like that?