Draft: Universal Document Identifiers

Simon Edward Spero (ses@cmns.think.com)
Thu, 5 Mar 92 10:09:58 EST 

Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 10:09:58 EST
From: ses@cmns.think.com (Simon Edward Spero)
Message-Id: <9203051509.AA13491@Cmns.Think.COM>
To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: peterd@expresso.cc.mcgill.ca, iafa-request@kona.cc.mcgill.ca,
In-Reply-To: Tim Berners-Lee's message of Thu, 5 Mar 92 15:25:08 GMT+0100 <9203051425.AA20144@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
Subject: Draft: Universal Document Identifiers


   usdn: prefix (or whatever) will not in practice be used. I'm all for  
   the market deciding between protocols.

"That's the nice think about standards- there are so many of them to choose
 from" :-) Universal is as Universal does...

   Simon:

   I would say "a server takes x500 UDIs and returns physical UDIs which  
   deleiver the goods themselves.", meaning the same thing.  (I would  
   allow it the option of delivering a set of addresses, not just one.)  
   Yes, x500 is heavyweight so one can have a lighter protocol which  
   accesses a real x500 engine via a gateway with a large cache.

I think we're getting on to the really big problem I've seen in every
single Doc-ID discussion: every body seems to use the same words to
mean different things. To me, there's no such thing as a physical UDI.
There can be a reference to a physical copy of a document named by a
UDI, but that doesn't seem to be what you mean. confusing everybody
else. Anybody want to offer up an 'official' notation?


   Good point.  What about versions which split?  A great spin-off of  
   having versions available is that you can refer to a line number in  
   them. A line number in a document which is not frozen is useless.  
   [This solves a recurring problem in hypertext systems, when one wants  
   to link to part of a document to which one has no write access, and  
   which may change].

   > Here are some suggestions.. Eat hot ASN, Cultural Cringer.
   > [...]

   We must be careful not to reinvent the wheel: if the USDN problem is  
   the same as the phone book problem (which it seems to be) then we  
   should pick up on x500.

Just a couple of tyres...there should be no problem using those PDUs
with X.500 (Steve?). 


   and i doubt whether either of those will scale to allow document  
   publishing on the net by every kindergarten child etc etc twice a  
   minute. That's why I assume x500 is best in theory at least. But tell  
   me I'm wrong.

Distinguished names are ok, but I'd still rather have an OID associated
with each naming authority (maybe in the future, everybody will be 
issued with an OID at birth! What's your clearance, citizen?)

Simon