# Re: allowable variations in URNs

Dirk Herr-Hoyman (hoymand@joe.uwex.edu)
Thu, 3 Mar 94 19:38:33 -0600

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    Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 19:38:33 -0600

    Message-Id: <9403040138.AA18447@joe.uwex.edu>

    To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, uri@bunyip.com

    From: hoymand@joe.uwex.edu (Dirk Herr-Hoyman)

    Subject: Re: allowable variations in URNs

At 12:38 PM 3/3/94 -0800, Larry Masinter wrote:
>>1)Two URN's are `the same URN' only if they are spelled the same.
>> In particular, URNs are case sensitive, have no
>> optional parts that default, and have no alternative encodings.
>
>I had a private message about case sensitivity in URNs. It made me
>think that in the interest of human transcribability that URNs should
>be `case insentitive' (E.g., that if someone types one with upper
>case, it should be translated to a lower case), and possibly even that
>some of the punctuation marks should be optional (e.g., if ISBN
>numbers appear with or without the hyphens.)
>
>This is an area where two requirements (simple comparison method, vs.
>human transcribability) might be in conflict, and the actual
>specification should try to find a reasonable compromise.

I would like to see UR* be case insensitive. As it's fairly easy to
convert case to all lower/upper, I don't see this as being a major
impediment to comparisons. The only good reason I can see for allowing
case sensitivity is for a larger alphabet, and I can't see that being
needed.

In work I have done with e-mail delivered documents, I have seen lots of
requests with all UPPER case, even though the instructions used lower case.
This is one place where I think we should let the computer (and
programmers) do a bit more work and save the humans a lot of pain and
grief.

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