# Re: Revision of Chris & Peter's URN paper

Bob Deen (RGD059@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov)
Wed, 20 Oct 1993 17:35:03 -0700 (PDT)

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    Date:    Wed, 20 Oct 1993 17:35:03 -0700 (PDT)

    From: RGD059@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov (Bob Deen)

    Message-Id: <931020173503.21a00326@MIPL3.JPL.NASA.GOV>

    Subject: Re: Revision of Chris & Peter's URN paper

    To: uri@bunyip.com

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here; I'm new to this group and
might be missing something (is it humanly possible to grind through >1.5MB
of mail archives and come away with anything other than a headache? :-)
And no, I'm not finished grinding yet...)

The concept of using < and > as wrappers for URLs has been discussed only
in the context of using them in plaintext. I think it may cause problems
with HTML, and would like to see something different, but I don't feel
terribly strongly about the issue.

The arguments in favor of the wrappers have talked about them *only*
being in plaintext. They can be stripped when they go into HTML or some
other format, so they don't cause a problem.

However, I found the following in the recent URN paper draft:

>2) The characters < and > are use as delimiters for the URN. Unlike the
>URL, this is built into the syntax of the URN; I still feel there is a need
>for termination characters especially when these are going to be cut and
>pasted.
>
> ...
>
>3.3 Components of the URN
>
>There are five components to the URN, separated by colons; the keyword
>'URN', a code specifying the character set encoding of the rest of the URN, a
>naming authority scheme identifier, a naming authority identifier, and an
>opaque string. The URN is surrounded by the characters '<' and '>', which are
>part of the syntax. Each part is described below. No component of the URN
>can contain the characters ':', '>', ' ', or '\' unless they are escaped by a
>backslash character '\'.

Apparently, this proposal uses the <> wrappers not just for plaintext, but
for *ALL* URNs! You can't strip them out if you're going to put them into
an HTML or SGML document, because they are required as part of the URN syntax.
If this is the case, all the arguments in favor of using <> for plaintext
wrappers (which have some merit) go right out the window. You will need
some sort of really ugly syntax to put a URN into an HTML document. Is this
what we really want?

Is there a compelling reason to have the <> wrapper as *part* of the URN,
or can it be treated the same as the URL, where it's only used as a plaintext
wrapper? After all, we should have real consistency between URNs and URLs,
or why bother breaking everything with the URL: prefix?

Bob Deen @ NASA-JPL Multimission Image Processing Lab
rgd059@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov span: mipl3::rgd059

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