# Re: date in URN

Karen R. Sollins (sollins@lcs.mit.edu)
Fri, 23 Jun 1995 17:49:34 -0400

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    Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 17:49:34 -0400

    Message-Id: <199506232149.RAA07142@lysithea.lcs.mit.edu>

    From: "Karen R. Sollins" <sollins@lcs.mit.edu>

    To: peterd@bunyip.com

    In-Reply-To: <9506231409.AA15135@expresso.bunyip.com> (message from Peter Deutsch on Fri, 23 Jun 1995 10:09:17 -0400)

    Subject: Re: date in URN

Peter,

We've been through some of these arguments about the degree of
user-friendliness before (I'm sure you were there - didn't we do some
of this in Houston?)

There are several different things we need to be able to do. Human
friendly names need to be short, nmemonic, probably limited in scope,
reusable, etc. You and I both may have things we like to call
"my-address-book". They identify different objects in different human
friendly naming contexts, but they have the same name at one level of
abstraction. Somewhere below that level of abstraction we have a need
in the global net for globally unique identifiers. I believe that
we've perpetuated a slight mistake in the URI WG by calling these
things URNs ("names") because too people assume that a name has to be
human friendly. These things should be as human unfriendly as we can
get away with, to discourage their direct use by humans. They are
serving a different purpose at a different level of abstraction than
human friendly names.

Karen

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