Re: request for assignment of informal urn

worley@ariadne.com (Dale R. Worley) Mon, 23 February 2015 03:58 UTC

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From: worley@ariadne.com
To: Peter Saint-Andre - &yet <peter@andyet.net>
Subject: Re: request for assignment of informal urn
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IMHO, the correct way to handle fragment identifiers is to ignore the
fact that the URN syntax doesn't permit them.  The two main reasons for
that are (1) work is underway to allow specifying fragment identifiers
with URNs, and (2) by analogy with all other URIs, everyone knows how
they'll work syntactically.  A more subtle reason is (3) the fragment
identifier can be semantically separated from the "base" URN, in that
the definition of the URN namespace tells how to map the URN into a
"resource", and the resource itself determines how the fragment
identifier is to be interpreted.

Within that framework, the politics of the situation is much improved if
the namespace doesn't explicitly define fragment identifiers as part of
the syntax, and the practice is implicitly what everybody expects
already.

But it's not clear why a new namespace is needed -- instead of defining
one namespace which is semantically the disjoint union of ISBNs and
UUIDs, instead have the set of admissible URNs be the (intrinsically
disjoint) union of ISBN and UUID URNs.

The only reason I can see for a new namespace is if the process by which
a fragment identifier is applied to a resource is determined not by the
resource itself but by the namespace definition.  That is,
"urn:isbn:0-345-33971-1#epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]/16[svgimg])"
might mean something different than
"urn-NNN:isbn:0-345-33971-1#epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]/16[svgimg])"
even though they both intrinsically refer to fragments within the "book"
that has the ISBN 0-345-33971-1.

Dale