We should drop the useless urn: prefix

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Following the discussion at the plenary where I didn't get the chance
to put the record straight, I have been looking at the existing IETF
URN scheme for RFCs and IDs. I plan to add support for this to the
output of my rfctool.

The rfc on IETF URNs is farily old and dates from the 'wasted years'.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2648
urn:ietf:rfc:2648


So some history on URLs and URL like things. Back in 1993 I discussed
URNs with Tim Berners Lee including the fact that to buy and sell
'stuff' online we would want URLs for cans of baked beans etc. So
there should be a UPC: 'URL'.

That conversation predates the mistake of introducing the false
distinction between URLs and URNs. From a semiotic point of view, ALL
URIs are names except for the 'data' URI and the digest based URIs. A
DNS name is a name. That is why is is called the Domain NAME System.

Whether a URI is a name or a locator depends entirely on how it is
used. Order baked beans from Amazon via the UPC code and it is a
locator. You choose your 'baked beans resolution service' as Amazon,
Peapod, Tesco, etc.

Names and locators are distinct use categories but not distinct
syntactic categories. The distinction comes from whether the name is
sufficiently complete to resolve the identifier to the identified or
not.


Since urns are not a distinct syntactic category, the justification
for the urn: prefix disappears. It is not only useless, it is
unnecessary. There is no circumstance in which a urn subscheme and a
uri scheme should be allowed to have divergent meanings.

Why make people write urn:ietf:rfc:2648 when ietf:rfc:2648 is sufficient?

I think it comes down to ring-kissing: Lets make everyone acknowledge
the fact that they are participating in our information universe which
we control.


The insistence on the urn prefix is leading to divergence where it
comes to DOIs. The DOI folk understand naming at least as well as we
do and they have no interest at all in sticking a 'URN' prefix at the
start.

http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html


DOI: is a perfectly valid and well defined scheme. We should recognize
it as such and assign a top level URI identifier.