# Comments on URN ID

Chris Weider (clw@merit.edu)
Tue, 18 May 93 15:51:54 -0400

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    Date: Tue, 18 May 93 15:51:54 -0400

    From: "Chris Weider" <clw@merit.edu>

    Message-Id: <9305181951.AA13334@merit.edu>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: Comments on URN ID

Gang:
After the flurry of mail on this, I'm willing to remove the Draft's
recommendation about human readability. Human readability does not affect the
persistent naming functionality, and only slightly impacts the detection of
duplicates, given that we are going to have a number of different naming
authorities giving URNs to the same resource. However, I think that it would
be a mistake to say anything further about the format of the URN in the draft.
It seems obvious to me that we really don't know what kind of names people
are going to find useful, so if we allow maximum flexibility now we can
then help standardize later.

Clearing up other comments on this:
I think that these URNs are going to serve as de facto citations for at least
a while. So be it. If we can start work on some form of citation syntax
(which ties in with the data elements discussions we have been having) soon,
I think that would be good.

I don't have a really good feel for how many older systems are out there....
should the case-insensitive thing be dropped?

Dave Brennan writes:
"Why does the wrapper have to use repeated colons?" That's there
to make the URN easy to identify in a block of text.... it's also easy
to educate people that the URN starts with "URN:" and ends with ":::",
that way they can cut and paste without worrying that they have too much....

So I will take comments for another few days and then resubmit the draft with
the recommended changes.
Chris (and Peter)

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