tag: and urn:tag: considered unnecessary

I am writing to suggest that the tag: and urn:tag: schemes proposed in
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kindberg-tag-uri-04.txt are
not necessary, being already subsumed in the existing urn:newsml scheme.

urn:newsml has an unfortunately over-specific name, I admit from
the beginning.  But it has essentially the same structure as tag: and
provides the same benefits.  A newsml scheme URI looks like this:

	urn:newsml:whatever.com:20010911:anyoldstring:1

This is, semantically speaking, a tag minted by whoever held
"whatever.com" on 2001-09-11, and is named "anyoldstring".  The 1 part is
a positive integer representing a version number: this is not optional,
but can always be set to 1 for people who don't need versioning.

For those who do, it is guaranteed that it is monotonically increasing
with time: any newly minted URI that agrees in its first five components
with an existing URI must have a higher version number.

The urn:newsml scheme is described in RFC 3085.

-- 
All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part          John Cowan
that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part            www.ccil.org/~cowan
that cooks with olive oil, and the part that            www.reutershealth.com
cooks with butter. -- David Chessler                    jcowan@reutershealth.com

Received on Friday, 21 March 2003 15:52:09 UTC