Re: Belated comments on OCLC's proposal

One short, big disagreement here.

>As for scaling, we believe that the registered NA space will be smaller
>by several orders of magnitude than the DNS space.  Paul's suggestion
>of reserving a character to promote future hierarchy will be in our
>next revision.

I'd very much like to see more on your thoughts for this central registry.
Under no circumstances could I imagine that there would be "several orders
of magnitude" fewer URN publishing names than there are domain names today
unless you intend to restrict the granting of names. If we do URNs even 25%
right, everyone will want a name. If you intend to restrict the names or
otherwise make them unattractive, I think the WG should certainly know how
and why. A separate draft would probably be appropriate.

And, if there *are* only a handful of flat names, why not just give them
simple DNS names and resolve them there? I mean, what's really the
difference between NA=OCLC and NA=oclc.org? NA=PROPER or NA=proper.com?

--Paul Hoffman
--Proper Publishing

Received on Tuesday, 20 June 1995 13:25:23 UTC