Re: [urn] I-D Action: draft-saintandre-urn-example-00

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2013-01-09 16:59, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 01/09/2013 10:48 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> urn:uuid: is used a lot in practice, and I simply don't see a
>>>>> practical problem with it.
>>> Whether something works well in practice, and whether something conforms
>>> to the intent of a standard, are of course two separate questions.
>>>
>>> Again, URNs were designed to identify resources.   If people use them
>>> for other things, that's not a problem so long as such use doesn't
>>> degrade the intended utility of URNs.   It's not like the protocol
>>> police are going to chase down the users of UUID URNs and put them in
>>> jail if those UUIDs weren't chosen to refer to resources.  And of course
>>> you can't tell by looking what is named by a URN  - and that is a
>>> feature, not a bug.
>>>
>>> But just because people find uses for URNs that weren't intended,
>>> doesn't mean that the URN standard should be changed to encompass those
>>> uses.  This _would_ degrade the utility of URNs.
>>>
>>> To be clear, there's nothing in principle wrong with a UUID URN. What's
>>> wrong is using a UUID URN just because what you need is a unique
>>> identifier that doesn't refer to a resource, and you want that unique ID
>>> to be some sort of URI.   Yes, it probably does little harm most of the
>>> time, but it's still not a good idea to promote the practice.
>>> ...
>>
>> "This specification does not limit the scope of what might be a
>> resource; rather, the term "resource" is used in a general sense for
>> whatever might be identified by a URI." --
>> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc3986.html#rfc.section.1.1>
>>
>> Case closed.
> yes, but it didn't anticipate that URNs would be widely used to not name
> resources at all.
>
> again, most such uses do little harm.  but that's not an argument for
> perverting URNs to be just
> random numbers instead of resource identifiers.
> ...

My point being: they *are* resource identifiers.

Best regards, Julian