Re: A few quick thoughts on "lex" (was" Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list)
worley@ariadne.com (Dale R. Worley) Wed, 31 December 2014 23:40 UTC
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To: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
Subject: Re: A few quick thoughts on "lex" (was" Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list)
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John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> writes: > I draw two conclusions for the above. FIrst, there are a lot of > issues, some related to legal documents, some to URN (or URI) > niceties, and some to authority, that the document just does not > have sorted out yet. Second, the IETF may be appropriate as a > place to sort out the best syntax model for registering an > established name space as a URN-embedded namespace, but we > should not be in the business of recognizing or ratifying naming > authorities, especially in areas we know almost nothing about > (either technically or in terms of socio-political > relationships). [etc.] All of this is very well-said. Experience shows that the IETF is not a good forum to address issues traditionally handled by librarians. It seems to me that there are two ways to proceed with this document. One way is to provide proper references to a sufficiently universal association/authority of legal scholarship/librarianship/legislation that has examined and approved the underlying naming system, so that the IETF can be assured that the system as a whole has been examined and approved by people who are subject-matter experts. A second way is to consider this to be an experimental proposal. Then we can approve the publication of the current state of the proposal in order to inform the public, but leave the long-term development of the system to ITTIG or whoever. However, assuming that we proceed with the second method, there are some issues that must be resolved. 1) The syntax as presented in the draft produces URNs which are not accepted by the syntax of RFC 3986, even if we extend 3986 with the query and fragment syntax of 2396. (This is a critical technical requirement.) 2) The authorities that govern certain elements of the syntax are neither specified clearly or flagged as requiring further work. For example, the jurisdiction codes seem to be intended to be ISO 3166 Alpha-2 codes with assorted exceptions, but how the exceptions are defined is not made clear. Similarly, how the codes for non-nation-state entities are allocated is unclear. The proposal seems to allow for <jurisdiction-code>s to be reassigned, requiring wholesale reassignment of URNs. This is contrary to the principles of URN assignment. (The reassignment of codes is a critical technical requirement.) 3) The discussion of <jurisdiction-unit> gives as examples "br:governo:decreto", "br;sao.paulo:governo:decreto", and "br;sao.paulo;campinas:governo: decreto". But none of these conform to the provided syntax -- ":" is not permitted in <jurisdiction-unit>, and " " is not permitted in URIs. I believe that this is simply an oversight, and that the intended examples are "br", "br;sao.paulo", and "br;sao.paulo;campinas". But the fact that such an error has been made in the text suggests that the proposal has not been carefully edited. The proposal needs to be edited to be free of easily-visible errors as a demonstration that sufficient care has been taken in composing its text. (This is a matter of assuring the quality of the proposal document.) 4) The handling of characters outside of the 26-letter Latin alphabet seems to be philosophically contrary to internationalization. Indeed, the approach of requesting that all elements which are derived from natural language be turned into sequences of Latin letters is what I would expect a naive American to propose! In contrast, the URI system provides a method of encoding the full Unicode character set. (Albeit this encoding is visually ugly, it is uniquely mappable to and from a representation of the URI with the escapes represented by the glyphs they represent -- the latter representation is visually compatible with the original natural language.) Similarly, the DNS system (via Punycode) provides a method of encoding the full Unicode character set as components of DNS labels. And modern computer systems seem to commonly support the full Unicode character set. These considerations taken together suggest to me that an international legal reference system should express that the glyphs of all writing systems are equal. (This is a matter of supporting the IETF's principles of internationalism.) Dale
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Sean Leonard
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Martin J. Dürst
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list John C Klensin
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Barry Leiba
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Sean Leonard
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list John C Klensin
- A few quick thoughts on "lex" (was" Re: [urn] con… John C Klensin
- Re: A few quick thoughts on "lex" (was" Re: [urn]… Dale R. Worley
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Barry Leiba
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list John C Klensin
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Sean Leonard
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Barry Leiba
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Sean Leonard
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Juha Hakala
- Re: [urn] continued use of urn-nid@ietf.org list Barry Leiba