Overloaded URIs must GO!

[Didier PH Martin]

Hi David,

David said:
There are two good arguments in favour, though no doubt these could be
answered:

1. URNs don't really exist, or at least, last I checked, there was no
   authoritative specification of the different URN schemes (without
   which URNs are worthless).  URNs have been under development for
   most of the 1990s with few tangible results, and I'm growing
   slightly skeptical.

Didier says:
David, I participated to the URN elaboration within IETF auspices. If you go
the IETF official RFC repository you'll find that the RFC 2141 defining URNs
is posted since already at least more than a year. So URNs are as real as
XML is and because it is the byproduct of IETF probably created in a more
democratic way than XML itself. Also, an other RDF has been created to
specify how URNs are resolved with DNS. Bottom line there is an
authoritative specification: RFC 2141.

If you mean that there is not a lot of implementation of URNs, you are
right. But URNs are well defined. and if you have a DNS server, you can even
resolve a URN within your domain. Its only a question of entering the right
DNS record and have a client aware of the URN resolution mechanism.

This said, you may say that URN suffer from resistance in the market because
of the legacy: the URL. And you'll be right. But you'll have to apply the
same reasoning to XML and its own legacy : HTML.

Regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind at netfolder.com
http://www.netfolder.com



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