RE: Registration request for a URN according to RFC 3406

Jörg Walther <jwalther@odette.org> Thu, 11 September 2014 06:50 UTC

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From: Jörg Walther <jwalther@odette.org>
To: "Dale R. Worley" <worley@ariadne.com>
Subject: RE: Registration request for a URN according to RFC 3406
Thread-Topic: Registration request for a URN according to RFC 3406
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Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 06:50:36 +0000
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Dear Dale,

thanks a lot for your helpful reply.

I will discuss your reply with our experts and improve my request ( I uploaded the I-D yesterday to that web site already).

Thankls again and kind regards

Jörg
________________________________________
From: Dale R. Worley [worley@ariadne.com]
Sent: 10 September 2014 16:32
To: Jörg Walther
Cc: urn-nid@apps.ietf.org; Rob Exell
Subject: Re: Registration request for a URN according to RFC 3406

> From: Jörg Walther <jwalther@odette.org>
>
> on behalf of the Joint Automotive Industry Forum (JAIF) I would like
> to register the urn:jaif.
>
> Please find attached the text document with the proposed RFC draft.

The best practice is to submit the draft (at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/submit/) before requesting review.  That
ensures that everyone who reviews the document sees exactly the same
document, and that there is a record of what the document was, which
can be referred to by people who see these messages in the mailing
list archive in the future.  Submitting a draft is not considered a
"formal" or "heavy weight" activity; there is no penalty for
submitting a draft that has not yet been perfected.

It is customary to name a draft using this format:

    draft-[your surname]-[optionally, the destination working group name]-[further names]-[NN].[extension]

In this case, there is no working group name.  So a conventional name
for your draft could be "draft-walther-jaif-urn-00.txt".  A
participant who has no specific knowledge of this draft can look at
that name and deduce that it was probably submitted by a person named
"Walther", and it probably regards URNs for "JAIF".  (BTW, I notice
that neither "JAIF", "Joint Automotive Industrial Forum", nor "ODETTE"
has a page in the English-language Wikipedia, so our hypothetical
reader would have some trouble determining what "JAIF" was without
reading into the draft.)

> If there is anything in addition or alternatively I should do to
> initiate the formal process, I'd appreciate your helpful hints.

   2.1 Declaration of Syntactic Structure

   The Namespace Specific String (NSS) of all URNs assigned by the JAIF
   will have the following hierarchical structure:

   urn:jaif:{category}:{string}

   where the "category" is a US-ASCII string that conforms to URN syntax
   requirements (RFC 2141), and "{string}" is a string that conforms to
   URN syntax requirements (RFC 2141).

This needs to be revised.

Firstly, the description "conforms to the URN syntax requirements" is
inexact, because RFC 2141 contains the definitions of a number of
syntactic constructs -- which one is intended?  Indeed, the "default"
reading is that "category" conforms to the syntax definition of
*URNs*, which is definitely not what you intend.

Secondly, the syntax you've specified is ambiguous, because you don't
specify that "category" must not contain ":".  Thus,

   urn:jaif:A:B:C

may have a "category" of "A:B" and a "string" of "C", or a "category"
of "A" and a "string" of "B:C".

It would be convenient if you could specify that "category" conforms
to some particular nonterminal in RFC 2141, and the same for "string",
but there isn't an appropriate nonterminal for "category".  Worse,
there isn't even an appropriate nonterminal for the characters that
"category" is assembled from.  One could say

   2.1 Declaration of Syntactic Structure

   The Namespace Specific String (NSS) of all URNs assigned by the JAIF
   will have the following hierarchical structure:

   urn:jaif:<category>:<string>

   <category> ::= 1*<URN chars>

   <strong>   ::= 1*<URN chars>

   where the "category" MUST not contain ":".

That generates the set of URNs you intend, and ensures unique parsing.

Dale