From: mitra@pandora.sf.ca.us (Mitra)
Subject: Re: URN Requirements
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 22:25:55 GMT
Message-Id: <Cpx2B8.Jv2@pandora.sf.ca.us>
Firstly Xanadu specific references can easily be made globally unique by
selecting a peice of the namespace, and subdividing it up among Xanadu
servers. However I dont think this solves the basic problem.....
The real question is whether something is named with a URL or a URN. A
URN is independant of the retrieval method, so it would only work in
Xanadu if the object has some existance outside of Xanadu, i.e. if a
file was copied to a disk and shipped to someone else would it be
recognisable as the same object.
If Xanadu has (or rather will have :-) such an object then it could be
named with a URN, if not then its really a URL, and that can be handled
by allocating "xanadu:" as a prefix for URLs and whatever additional
syntax the xanadu folks want.
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