RE: uri, urn and info

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