# Re: (r.vasudevan 19) XFN Specification

Owen Rees (rtor@ansa.co.uk)
Tue, 27 Sep 1994 14:29:56 BST

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    Message-Id: <9409271329.AA15798@plato.ansa.co.uk>

    To: Petr Janecek <petja@xopen.co.uk>

    Subject: Re: (r.vasudevan 19) XFN Specification

    In-Reply-To: Message from petja@xopen.co.uk of Tue, 27 Sep 1994 09:28:29 +0100.

                 <9409270835.AA21272@xopen.co.uk>

    Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 14:29:56 BST

    From: Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>

Petr Janecek <petja@xopen.co.uk> writes:
> I have not seen the previous "emotional" discussion and thus fail to
> understand what the real problem is. For what purpose is the specification
> source needed ?

One of the authors of XFN suggested that the proposed Informationl RFC on
Requirements for Uniform Resource Names be delayed until at least an attempt
had been made to align it with XFN. The delay would serve no purpose if XFN is
not available to those who are working on URI in general and URN in
particular. Given the difficulty that most people have of obtaining any budget
to work on standards, documents with a price tag are generally inaccessible to
any standards community.

Although we (APM on behalf of the sponsors of ANSA) generally charge for our
documents, we know that we have to give away anything we want taken into
account by a standards body. We want our report on naming to be available to
the URI community, so it is about to change from being available for sale on
paper, to being available free online.

> for obvious reasons. Other organizations, including OSF, XAPIA, OMG, NMF,
> UniForum and others, do the same. A single copy of a specification does not

OMG runs a mail server from which you can retrieve the CORBA 1.2 spec along
with many other documents related to its standardization activities. Even ISO
is becoming more open to the generally interested observer, with some Draft
International Standards being available online.

The bottom line is that standards involving naming, federation, and federated
naming systems are being developed without reference to, or in some cases
knowledge of, XFN. It is up to X/Open to contribute XFN to these initiatives
if it wants it taken into account.

Regards,
Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>
Information about ANSA is at <URL:http://www.ansa.co.uk/>.

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