Subject: Protocol Action: 'Uniform Resource Names (URNs)' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-22.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2017 08:40:45 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Uniform Resource Names (URNs)'
  (draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-22.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Uniform Resource Names, Revised
Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Alexey Melnikov, Ben Campbell and Alissa
Cooper.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn/

Technical Summary

This document defines "Uniform Resource Name", a URI that is assigned 
under the "urn" URI scheme and a particular URN namespace, with the 
intent that the URN will be a persistent, location-independent resource 
identifier.  With regard to URN syntax, this document defines the 
canonical syntax for URNs (in a way that is consistent with URI syntax), 
specifies methods for determining URN-equivalence, and discusses URI 
conformance.  With regard to URN namespaces, this document specifies a 
method for defining a URN namespace and associating it with a namespace 
identifier, and describes procedures for registering namespace 
identifiers with IANA.  This document obsoletes RFCs 2141 and 3406.

The document is defining a standard, and is therefore submitted to the 
Standards Track as a Proposed Standard.

Working Group Summary

The life of this document and the URNbis working group that produced it 
has been long and troubled.  Over the six years since the work started, 
the document has been reviewed by a fair number of people, but they have 
come and gone over those years.  What remains is a stalwart, relatively 
small group -- on the order of ten participants -- who have stuck it 
through and continue to comment.  That stalwart group comprises 
essentially the entire community within the IETF that cares how this 
comes out, which is a good sign.  A few people who were active 
participants some time ago have gone silent over the last year or so, 
and they could resurface during IETF last call.

Yet that stalwart group disagrees on many things, which fact has 
resulted in a six-year process for something that we expected to take 
more like two.  It doesn't make much sense to try to list specific 
topics for which there was disagreement.  What makes more sense is to 
note that most of the active participants were on a conference call at 
the end of June 2016, and that that call resulted in discussion of and 
plans for resolution of all the significant disagreements that remained.  
It took the authors a number of months to be able to allocate the time 
to go through and make the agreed-upon changes, but that call showed 
that the working group really was able to work together, compromise when 
necessary, and come up with something everyone could live with, even if 
it wasn't their preferred solution.

The resulting document is a solid piece of work that does have rough 
consensus of the working group and accomplishes what the working group 
set out to do.

One point that does merit pointing out is the relationship of this 
document to RFC 3986 (which defines URIs, and which is a key related 
document).  There were discussions of deviating from 3986 or not, and 
how far, if so.  There were discussions of what the concepts of URI 
fragments and query strings can mean with respect to URNs, whether to 
allow them, and how to handle them, if so.  There were discussions of 
what to say about whether and when URNs might be resolvable, and what 
that would mean.  In the end, while there remains some level of 
disagreement about some of that, the current document represents a
consensus view on the resolution of those discussions.

Document Quality

URNs are used in many places, in particular as XML namespace URIs
and more generally when using persistent identifiers in documents.
The document is mostly updating IANA registration policy (which doesn't
affect implementations) and making URNs more flexible as far as their
use with fragment identifiers, etc.

Personnel

Barry Leiba is the document shepherd; Alexey Melnikov is the responsible 
Area Director.