Re: [URN] focus the question

[Frederick Roeber <[e-mail]>]

On the question of reserving all two-letter pairs vs. only reserving
already assigned ISO two-letter country codes:

> "draft-ietf-urn-nid-req-06.txt", dated October 8, 1998, introduced
> a change. I am discussing the change. The change was to reserve
> all two-letter URN namespaces.

The only reason I suggested this change was that the previous documents
merely reserved the two-letter codes which were already country codes. 
Obviously, that can break the next time someone revolts.  DNS reserves
all two-letter codes -- assigned by ISO or not -- for the same reason.

The issue of whether or not someone can create a meaningful country code
namespace is orthogonal to our reserving "zz" for some future Republic
of Zzyzx.


On the question of reserving country codes at all:

> let the subsequent process for namespace management (described in 
> the rest section 4.0,III. Formal) discuss the appropriateness of
> a two-letter code as a top level namespace.

They'll have to go through the procedures anyway.  But reserving their
country codes just means than when Turkmenistan gets around to putting
its phone numbers or document IDs or whatever into URNs, just like the
US, FR, CH, DE, etc. have in the by-then-expected way, it won't discover
that the American trademark office has usurped "tm."

Reserving the two-letter (potential) NIDs for their countries doesn't
mean we endorse or encourage their indiscriminate use.  It just means
that should they prove useful, all countries are equally protected.

I'm not convinced that country codes are the best namespaces, though
there are a lot of national namespaces that could naturally be
grandfathered in in this way.  But at this late a date, unless we have
an overriding other need for two-letter NIDs (e.g., a global character
shortage), I say mark 'em reserved and move on.

-- 
Frederick Roeber