From: asg@severn.wash.inmet.com (Al Gilman)
Message-Id: <9511222124.AA21131@severn.wash.inmet.com>
Subject: Re: mid and cid URLs -- Consensus!
To: moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 16:24:08 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199511222038.PAA04211@wilma.cs.utk.edu> from "Keith Moore" at Nov 22, 95 03:38:46 pm
To follow up on what Keith Moore said ...
Perhaps it's best to think of it this way:
1. content-ids and message-ids aren't URLs.
Yes.
2. notwithstanding #1, it may be useful to extend the URL notation to
allow references to content-ids and/or message-ids.
Yes.
(they aren't necessarily URNs, either...though they have some of the
desirable characteristics of URNs, and they might someday be
incorporated into a URN name space.)
Well, almost consensus. They meet Roy's semantic test. I kept
referring to URI language because I had just read RFC 1808 on
relative URLs and the generic syntax there is talked about as a
generic URI syntax. That's where I picked that up. I am not
presuming that URN status would change the syntax one whit. It
is a difference in what you expect from the citation. The rabbit
out of the hat trick I was trying to pull was to call the mid:
scheme by the ambiguous "URI" term to get it through standardization,
and then after the fact come back and say "Poof! You already _have_
an example of a URN scheme!"
Issues:
1. the minor matter of the punctuation in:
scheme-name: "message-unique@path-to-host" punctuation
"part-unique@blah-blah-blah"
punctuation ::= # | ? | / ; Resolve at meeting
2. I wanted to turn on header encoding in parameters, thus:
(after the above)
*( ; header-name=header-value-phrase )
header-name ; per RFC 822
header-value-phrase ; per RFC 822 quoted and escaped asreq.
Is good for legacy multi-mode, multi-server objects like FAQs.