- From: Grosso, Paul <pgrosso@ptc.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 11:39:40 -0500
- To: <public-xml-core-wg@w3.org>
I've been asked the following:
---
It's understood that a URI can contain a query after 
the path as in the URL below, but can a URN contain 
a query as in the URN below:
  foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose
  \_/   \______________/\_________/ \_________/ \__/
   |           |            |            |        |
scheme     authority       path        query   fragment
   |   _____________________|__
  / \ /                        \
  urn:example:animal:ferret:nose?type=blue;etc.  
---
Since a URN is a URI, I see nothing in 3986 [1] preventing 
a URN-schemed URI from having the optional query part.
RFC 2141 [2] defines a URN as:
   <URN> ::= "urn:" <NID> ":" <NSS>
and
   <NSS>         ::= 1*<URN chars>
   <URN chars>   ::= <trans> | "%" <hex> <hex>
   <trans>       ::= <upper> | <lower> | <number> | <other> | <reserved>
   <hex>         ::= <number> | "A" | "B" | "C" | "D" | "E" | "F" |
                     "a" | "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "f"
   <other>       ::= "(" | ")" | "+" | "," | "-" | "." |
                     ":" | "=" | "@" | ";" | "$" |
                     "_" | "!" | "*" | "'"
   <reserved>    ::= '%" | "/" | "?" | "#"
Given the productions, it looks like an <NSS> could consist
of "?type=blue;etc." (without the quotes), so again I see
nothing in 2141 preventing a URN-schemed URI from having 
the optional query part, but I wonder what others think.
Of course, whether there is a UA that would actually do what
the user wants with such a URI is another question, but I
was wondering what others in this WG think about what the
specs are saying.
paul
[1] ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt
[2] ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2141.txt
Received on Friday, 5 January 2007 16:40:15 UTC