- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 00:36:21 -0700
- To: uri@w3.org
To return to the discussion of http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-00.txt which started all of this: Section 7.2 "Why Not Use a URN Namespace ID for Identifiers from Public Namespaces?" claims, for "info" URIs: Some of these namespaces will not have persistence of identifiers as a primary purpose, while others will have locator semantics as well as name semantics. It would therefore be inappropriate to employ a URN Namespace ID for such namespaces. There is no requirement that URN namespaces have 'persistence of identifiers as a primary purpose'. Yes, it is advised that URN namespaces should be persistent. But most of the examples of URN namespaces don't have persistence as their primary purpose. There have been no examples of 'info' namespaces proposed that do not have persistence. There is no requirement that URN namespaces not also have 'locator semantics'. It is only required that URN namespaces have name semantics. Given the (purported and demonstrated) ease of registering URN namespaces, the fact that the public has not generally availed itself of the process of registering URN namespaces is no excuse for establishing another process, especially one which is less transparent. For example, the Internet Draft suggests, in section 4, that there is a policy that (US) NISO will follow, but it doesn't articulate the policy, does not document the process, and the suggested URI for the process http://info-uri.niso.org/info-uri-policy yields (at least currently) "Cannot find server or DNS Error". So my suggestion is that NISO instead dedicate itself to registering URN namespaces (with IANA using the documented URN process) for the namespaces that it would have otherwise registered as "info" namespaces, and that IETF not proceed with the publication of this draft. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 03:41:12 UTC