Re: "Guidelines for the Use of XML in IETF Protocols"

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Larry Masinter" <LMM@acm.org>
To: "'Tim Berners-Lee'" <timbl@w3.org>; "'www-tag'" <www-tag@w3.org>
Cc: <ietf-xml-use@imc.org>
Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 8:31 PM
Subject: RE: "Guidelines for the Use of XML in IETF Protocols"


> (suggest followup to ietf-xml-use@imc.org)

http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-use/index.html
is the archive, for anyone on www-tag who witshes to follow this.
For folks on that list, the www-tag archive is at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/thread.html#78

> > FYI.  I note that this note encourages/mandates   urn:s
> > instead of http: URIs for namespaces in direct contradiction
> > with the current draft by Tim Bray.
> > 
> 
> Please look carefully: the recommendation narrowly applies
> only to IETF standards-track documents; given recent discussions
> about (the difficulty of establishing) IETF policy on maintenance
> of various web resources, using the urn:ietf: namespace for
> such seemed prudent.
> 
> What HTTP URI would you suggest instead?

http://www.ietf.org/2001/foobar
or
http://persistent.ietf.org/2001/foobar


along with a commitment that as long as the Internet and
DNS remain,  the given URI will be honored by some 
useful information, machine and/or human-readable,
about the thing defined.  This is of course not  esential
for XML to work, but is a practical service to the community.

The difficulty of establishing IETF policy on maintenance
of various web resources is only a matter of policy.
At least the identifier space and the look-up system have been
designed and do not need reinventing.

We would be happy to discuss with IETF people 
a mutual W3C-IETF mirroring system, and possibly contracts
for perpetual care.  But I do not see in fact there being
any problem in the next 5 years with the IETF just
supporting a service itself.

> Larry
>