Re: We should drop the useless urn: prefix

[t.p. <[e-mail]>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phillip Hallam-Baker" <[e-mail]>
To: "Dave Cridland" <[e-mail]>
Cc: "Michael Richardson" <[e-mail]>; "IETF Discussion
Mailing List" <[e-mail]>
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 3:42 AM
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>
wrote:
> > On 26 March 2015 at 18:42, Michael Richardson
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >> Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>     > 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 must agree.
> >> This distinction has always confused me.
> >
> > It's extremely useful in the XMPP world. We have both urn:xmpp (for
protocol
> > namespaces and other abstract names) and xmpp: (for addressable
entities)
> > and even xmpp:// (for client connection instructions).
> >
> > There's no confusion.
>
> Well obviously if you have an X-header and someone declares the same
> header then there is an issue. Most cases there isn't.
>
> > Of course, if we made the urn: scheme identifier optional (more or
less what
> > PH-B appears to suggest) it'd be most interestingly confusing.
>
> I think urn: serves the same function of x-headers which is to say a
> useless syntactic distinction that leads to unnecessary confusion.

Phillip

I wonder if you are familiar with NETCONF and YANG, the latter currently
undergoing an explosive growth the like of which I have not seen in the
IETF before.  Both make extensive use of urn: and while the output of a
IETF WG is likely to be urn:ietf: the probability is that many other
organisations, as with SNMP, will create their own modules.

Since these are (XML) namespaces, I wonder what you would suggest as an
alternative.

Tom Petch

> We should define URI schemes for DOI, UPC and ISSN and make them all
top level.
>
> > In some cases, I've seen people use URLs to RFCs as protocol
identifiers,
> > too; I recall XACML does this for LDAP attributes, which is
tremendously
> > weird.
>
> Very weird since OASIS has their own urn namespace which they use in
> xacml v3 and before that was defined, SAML used the document URNs (at
> least in the specs I wrote).
>
> Of course, if there was a prior use of a URL for that purpose it might
> have been imported. The only advantage of URNs for that application is
> to avoid unnecessary lookups when idiot software goes and slams a
> server.
>