[urn] A comment on draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-02

[Bengt Neiss <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

Just a comment on the text of the new text (RFC2141bis-urn-02)

I am concerned about the phrase "special meaning" in the text in the section "2.3.2. The percent character, percent encoding" as follows


"Namespaces MAY designate one or more characters from the URN
character repertoire as having special meaning for that namespace.
If the namespace also uses that character in a literal sense as well,
the character used in a literal sense MUST be encoded with "%"
followed by the hexadecimal representation of that octet.  Further, a
character MUST NOT be percent-encoded if the character is not a
reserved character."


Does "special meaning" mean "reserved character (should be treated as a reserved character within that namespace)" and thus MUST be percent encoded if it is used in a literal sense within the NSS?


In section "4.4 Additional considerations" in RFC3188bis-nbn-urn-03 the following text can be found:



"Hyphen MUST be used as the delimiting character between the prefix

 and the NBN string.  Within the NBN string, hyphen MAY be used for

 separating different sections of the identifier from one another."

My interpretation of this text is that URN's can look like "urn:nbn:se:kb-1234-5678"
Is hyphen in this text a character with a "special meaning"?

Depending on how the text about "special meaning" is interpreted the text about the use of hyphen in the NBN namespace might violate the section in RFC2141bis.


I think the phrase "special meaning" needs some clarification.


Regards,

//Bengt




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Bengt Neiss
Kungl. Biblioteket / National Library of Sweden
Phone: [phone]