- From: Hammond, Tony (ELSLON) <T.Hammond@elsevier.com>
- Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 09:24:08 +0100
- To: 'John Cowan' <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
- Cc: 'Larry Masinter' <LMM@acm.org>, uri@w3.org
> > There is no requirement that URN namespaces have 'persistence of > > identifiers as a primary purpose'. > > The above statement conflicts with this opening passage from RFC 2141: > > "Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are intended to serve as persistent, > location-independent, resource identifiers." > > So, again we are left feeling really confused. Maybe it's just the words > that are being used. John Cowan writes: Construe, construe! There is no requirement that URN namespaces have persistence of identifiers AS THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE. urn:newsml: identifiers, for example, are primarily intended for location independence and uniqueness: persistence may or may not be important (notoriously, yesterday's newspaper wraps today's fish). I thought I was construing correctly. I read primary as meaning "first". I follow the word order as presented in the RFC. I understand "intend" to have its normal intent. All you have demonstrated to me is that the "newsml" URN NID may have been inappropriately allocated. I therefore query what the true intent of the "urn" URI scheme is for. It could seem to be providing a miscellaneous category for URI allocation. I query also the mantra of "more URI schemes considered harmful". I think this relates back somehow to the notion that all schemes are variously dereferenceable and therefore the number of transport protocols that software agents will need to support should be limited. Instead, if one considers URI in a broader context as providing a global naming architecture for resource identification and URIs are recognizable "in context" - then I see no especial harm in an agent being able to recognize but not action a given URI. Tony
Received on Saturday, 11 October 2003 04:24:27 UTC