# Re: URN Requirements

David G. Durand (dgd@cs.bu.edu)
Mon, 16 May 1994 23:17:51 -0500

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    Message-Id: <199405170312.XAA05136@cs.bu.edu>

    Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 23:17:51 -0500

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    From: "David G. Durand" <dgd@cs.bu.edu> (David G. Durand)

    Subject: Re: URN Requirements

Mitra writes:
....
>My understanding of Xanadu is that it makes extensive use of quoting of
>portions of documents ( a weakness, IMHO of the WWW) this needs handling
>by specifying a URN (or URL) and a fragment, standardisation of
>fragments was bumped off the agenda of the URI group at the DC IETF, and
>I still think we will need to tackle it sometime.
>
>- Mitra

I've been watching this discussion and this seems to me to offer a
convenient point to jump in. My research is concerned with Xanadu-like
storage of documents with flexible quoting and version management -- but I
_don't_ want to have a central server. I am looking with interest at URNs
because I want globally unique location independent identifiers. I just
plan on making up a URN for every fragment I need. In my system a document
is just a related collection of fragments. And what I need names for are
fragments. I don't see that in principle this will affect affect how things
work at all. Naming authorities can assign names to whatever size chunks
are convenient without a special "fragment" syntax. I'm not sure that a
common notion of fragment can be defined that will work for all systems, or
what it would really buy.

-- David Durand
Boston University Computer Science

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