Subject: [urn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:00:01 -0800

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
directories.
This draft is a work item of the Uniform Resource Names, Revised Working Group of the IETF.

	Title		: Uniform Resource Name (URN) Syntax
	Author(s)	: A. Hoenes
	Filename	: draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-00.txt
	Pages		: 24
	Date		: 2010-11-29
	
Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are intended to serve as persistent,
   location-independent, resource identifiers.  This document serves as
   the foundation of the 'urn' URI Scheme according to RFC 3986 and sets
   forward the canonical syntax for URNs, which subdivides URNs into
   "namespaces".  A discussion of both existing legacy and new
   namespaces and requirements for URN presentation and transmission are
   presented.  Finally, there is a discussion of URN equivalence and how
   to determine it.  This document supersedes RFC 2141.

   The requirements and procedures for URN Namespace registration
   documents are currently set forth in RFC 3406, which is also being
   updated by a companion, revised specification dubbed RFC 3406bis.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-00.txt

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---

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:18:13 +0100 (MEZ)

URN(bis) folks,
I have been challenged a bit by vacation in the U.S. and the attempt
of a newbee co-chair to get all right at once on first try (which we
perhaps should better not aim at).  This has proven incompatible with
the desire to do it quickly, but now our first WG draft is eventually
available in the Internet-Draft archives.  :-)
(I have copied the announcement below.)

This is the working version of the revised URN Syntax document
to start with in the 'official' WG discussion.

The initial draft for the revised URN Namespace Registration document
should be out within a couple of days, and then we also will re-submit
as WG drafts the two revised URN Namespace documents (for ISBN and NBN)
that already had been available as individual drafts.
If you have read these predecessors (listed in our charter) and have
pending comments that you did not raise before but would like to have
addressed in these WG -00 versions, please hurry up sending your
comments to the authors or the urn list.

However, the utmost priority of our work now is a thorough discussion
of the aforementioned two general, 'core' URN documents on which all
other work will rely.

Therefore, please start reading and commenting on the rfc2141bis I-D
as soon as you can.  I should perhaps recall that this discussion
serves to form WG consensus on the document and produce the textual
updates to the working copy that the document editor (myself in this
case) will integrate into the draft after consensus has been achieved
on this list.

Since we have a significant share of newcomers to the IETF on this
list, I'd like to add a few general remarks.

As you already have been reminded upon subscription to this list,
all contributions need to respect the IETF copyright rules that
ensure that the "end product" we aim at, the published RFCs, can
be used in the liberal way we are used to since decades.  By these
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which has been incorporated as the holder of all intellectual
property rights related to IETF publications and working material
and which in turn can carry forward such rights to other
organizations that want to build their work on IETF output.
These rules are summed up the the IETF "Note Well" page that will
navigate you to the detailed information and underlying documents,
see:  <http://www.ietf.org/about/note-well.html>.
A pointer to the most important IETF Trust page is included in the
Boilerplate "Copyright Notice" in all Internate-Drafts and RFCs,
and you can get more information on the IETF Trust in general at
<http://trustee.ietf.org/>.

As pointed out in the rfc2141bis draft, its most important goal is
to base URN Syntax on the applicable current Internet Standards.
This necessitiates a few important adaptations.

In order to better structure the discussion (and allow you to focus
on a relatively narrow part of the draft initially), I suggest that
we start evaluating the most basic parts of the document, the NID
and NSS syntax as laid down in Sections 2.1 and 2.2 of the draft,
before we progress to "higher level" issues for which we need to
form consensus.
The text there contains a lot of material to guide the reader on the
way from RFC 2141 to what we might want to specify in its successor.
At the end, these sections should become pretty short, but so far
they contain a lot of background information and questions to the
readers.  Please take these as an invitation to evaluate the
proposed changes from your particular point of view.  We need to
consolidate different perspectives in a way that acknowledges the
basic rule we owe to the persistency property of URNs: that any
update of the specification does not invalidate URNs assigned in
the past.

Of course, comments on other parts of the document are welcome
immediately, in particular if they are more editorial in nature,
but in order to be productive, we need to proceed bottom - up,
making the more elementary decisions first.

Hmmm -- it looks I already have spoken too much and should now
really mute and hand over the token to you!

Kind regards,
  Alfred.

-------- end of forwarded message --------

P.S.:
Note that a HTLM-ized version, differences to previous versions,
and other information on the draft (including a PDF version) is
available (or will become available as it emerges) on the IETF Tools
pages at:
  <http://tools.IETF.ORG/html/draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-00>.