Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 21:20:52 -0400
Message-Id: <199410270120.VAA03944@lysithea.lcs.mit.edu>
From: "Karen R. Sollins" <sollins@lcs.mit.edu>
To: fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9410252358.aa20034@paris.ics.uci.edu> (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Subject: Re: Current URN syntax is unacceptable
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 23:58:01 -0700
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
...text omitted for brevity
That is not what ":" suggests to me. "name:" suggests "what follows is
a name". "urn:" makes sense (though I think it is redundant, just as
URL: was redundant for URLs). "dns:" makes sense, providing that everything
following it remains in the DNS naming scheme. "path.net:" makes no
sense. And what happens when the opaque name contains a ":"?
Once we have decided on a syntax and any other constraints on URNs, if
there is any chance that the same string might be recognized as a URN
and a URL, we had better label it with something that indicates which
it is. Once one has to do this for a single string, one should do it
for all. I don't think we are talking about excluding the possibility
of overlap in namespaces. Since I believe consensus has been reached
in the group about not including "url:" in all urls, we will probably
discover that we must put "urn:" in urns.
...remainder deleted
Karen Sollins