RE: Proposal: new top level domain '.urn' alleviates all need for urn: URIs

At 12:38 07/07/03 +0300, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> > But if you insist on going forward, then:
> >
> >   http://urn.X.Y/
> >
> > is a sufficient hack.
>
>I think it's a rather elegant solution, not really a hack. It
>simply uses the existing domain and subdomain name registration
>infrastructure, guidelines, and general practices to partition
>the URI space into distinct managed subsets, which is what the
>urn: URI scheme is intended to do.
>
>But it does so in a manner that exploits the deployed HTTP
>infrastructure rather than require further machinery for URI
>resolution.
>
>Had someone thought of this approach back when URNs were first
>being concieved, we'd probably have countless such HTTP-URNs
>in use today.

FWIW, I've been doing something like this for a while, cf.

    http://id.ninebynine.org/
    http://id.mimesweeper.com/

The latter is interesting in that I did (at the time) get a commitment from 
higher management that the URI space designated would be held immune from 
re-use for any other purpose.  So far, it seems to have held through a 
change of company ownership and my own transfer to other pastures.

I still think it's a bit of a hack, but one that, as far as I can tell, is 
mostly harmless.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 09:36:50 UTC