# Re: Internet Draft on URNs

Ed Krol (e-krol@uiuc.edu)
Mon, 17 May 1993 08:38:15 -0500

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    Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 08:38:15 -0500

    Message-Id: <199305171338.AA21365@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

    To: ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu (Michael Mealling), krol@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Ed Krol)

    From: e-krol@uiuc.edu (Ed Krol)

    Subject: Re: Internet Draft on URNs

At 10:13 PM 5/16/93 -0400, Michael Mealling wrote:
> But internic.net itself is a name that doesn't carry any information in it.
>You know it's a name for a site on the net in the same way that you
>would know a URN is a name for a resource on the net. The metainformation
>that you personally know was obtained from someplace else and not from
>the name. In your example a footnote is a collection of metainformation plus
>probably a URN but not a URN in and of itself.

But everyone in the world carries around that metainformation and it is
useful and will remain used. If I say the Weider/Deutsch URN paper
I am counting on our metainformation being enough alike to make an ambiguous
reference. The metainformation won't change and if the URN is a unique
key string, then lets push for the arbitrary opaque-string to be useful so that
someone can use the document without having the full faith and credit of
the Internet to support it.

I'll say it one more time and shut up about it. I think the URN must provide
some 'clues' to the content of the information so that they can be
used in offline media. If that doesn't work, then you are cutting off a whole
market arbitrarily. It would be quite easy to do this through encouraging
the encoding of some metainformation in the URN. I basically believe that
if some other community developed a URN type facility which had all
the features of the one proposed plus some metainformation, we would
be left with a standard without a constituency.

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