- From: Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>
- Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 18:43:19 -0400
- To: "XML List" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>, <xsl-editors@w3.org>
Hi David, David said: There are two good arguments in favour, though no doubt these could be answered: 1. URNs don't really exist, or at least, last I checked, there was no authoritative specification of the different URN schemes (without which URNs are worthless). URNs have been under development for most of the 1990s with few tangible results, and I'm growing slightly skeptical. Didier says: David, I participated to the URN elaboration within IETF auspices. If you go the IETF official RFC repository you'll find that the RFC 2141 defining URNs is posted since already at least more than a year. So URNs are as real as XML is and because it is the byproduct of IETF probably created in a more democratic way than XML itself. Also, an other RDF has been created to specify how URNs are resolved with DNS. Bottom line there is an authoritative specification: RFC 2141. If you mean that there is not a lot of implementation of URNs, you are right. But URNs are well defined. and if you have a DNS server, you can even resolve a URN within your domain. Its only a question of entering the right DNS record and have a client aware of the URN resolution mechanism. This said, you may say that URN suffer from resistance in the market because of the legacy: the URL. And you'll be right. But you'll have to apply the same reasoning to XML and its own legacy : HTML. Regards Didier PH Martin mailto:martind@netfolder.com http://www.netfolder.com
Received on Friday, 28 May 1999 19:00:14 UTC