Re: [urn-nid] URN LEX Namespace submission

[Alfred Hönes <[e-mail]>]

Pierluigi et al.,
you wrote:

> Dear Sirs,
>
> please find in attachment the Internet Draft for urn:lex formal
> namespace registration.
>
> We tried to use the upload form service at
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/idst/upload.cgi
> but we had problems.

Looking at the attachment, it is clear that you must have run into
problems.  I immediately see four substantial reasons:

- non-use of mandatory boilerplate text (regarding IPR etc.) for the
  front page;
- use of non-ASCII characters in the document;
- inappropriate file name (should perhaps be something like
  draft-<author>-lex-urn-00.txt  for the inital version);
- References ar not split into Normative and Informative.

Did you ever try to run your document through the formal checker
('idnits') ?

You might better go to the IETF home page at http://www.IETF.ORG/
and look at the material offered in the section
"Internet-Drafts (I-Ds)" (shortly below the heading "At a glance".
The link items "About", "Guidelines", and "Checklist" will provide
you with the most important informations.

After skimming over the document body (without even having the
time to take a closer look at it), I however provide a few
preliminary comments:

Inside the attachment I see you making extensive use of an ad-hoc
specified variant of BNF.
Why don't you use ABNF (STD 68, RFC 5234) ?
Using formal languages familiar to folks in the IETF would increase
the willingness of folks to review and discuss your draft.
Conversion to ABNF should be relatively easy.
First step: No angle brackets within the rules; these are only
used as typographical markup for rule names in the prose text
with ABNF; your repetition operators can easily be mapped to ABNF.

Also, you quote RFC 2434, which has been obsoleted by RFC 5226
more than a year ago (if I don't err in the time scale).  In the
prose, you refer to RFC 5226, but the ref. entry is for 2434 !

I see no page formatting -- with the required headers and footers
(including the expiry information) -- for the 72 col x 56 lines(+FF)
I-D format (fitting on ISO A4 and U.S. Letter paper); this will
make it unlikely that folks routinely using decade-old procedures
to handle and print I-Ds (that still work for documents archived
20 years ago, and will work for future document for many years)
will be attracted by your document.

In order to get the registration, you have to follow the
procedures in RFC 3406 that hopefully end in a published RFC,
so you are well advised to follow the guidelines as early as
possible.

A much more fundamental question:

Did you look at the ITU-T work on OIDs with textual labels that now
has been submitted for registration as a URI/IRI Scheme as well?
Your examples let me infer that the delegation structure you have
in mind closely resembles OID arc delegations from the ITU-T (per
ISO-3166-1 country code and international treaty organizations etc.).
So it might be worth considering the use of 'oid' URIs/IRIs.
Please take a look at that work; the (still rough) most recent
I-D is  draft-larmouth-oid-iri-01; there you find the pointers to
the relevant ITU-T X.660 series documents).

And what about DOIs ?

If you can't reuse existing schemes, that needs to be discussed
in the namespace considerations, at least for the most similar
namespaces.

>
> Waiting for your kind reply
> best regards
>
> PierLuigi Spinosa
> Enrico Francesconi
> Caterina Lupo


Kind regards,
  Alfred Hönes.

-- 

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