> Will URNs permit pointing to things that aren't now and may never be
> on the web? I mean, things that their owners never intended to be on
> the web and either that their owners do not want to appear on the web,
> or that their owners may not (currently) see any interest in putting
> on the web?
Clearly yes. RFC 1737, "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names",
says:
# A URN identifies a resource or
# unit of information. It may identify, for example, intellectual
# content, a particular presentation of intellectual content, or
# whatever a name assignment authority determines is a distinctly
# namable entity. A URL identifies the location or a container for an
# instance of a resource identified by a URN. The resource identified
# by a URN may reside in one or more locations at any given time, may
# move, or may not be available at all.
Note especially the last phrase.
> -//Sears, Roebuck & Co.//NONSGML TOPIC 1922 Farm Catalog Number : R205//EN
Does this refer to an actual gadget, the class of such gadgets, or
the description of it? The "EN" suggests that it refers to the
description only.
> Please let's not deprecate FPIs; instead,
> let's understand and celebrate the difference between FPIs and URNs,
> even if/when URNs are terrifically indirect.
RFC 1737 contemplates FPIs as a particular case of URNs:
# For example, ISBN numbers, ISO
# public identifiers, and UPC product codes seem to satisfy the
# functional requirements, and allow an embedding that satisfies
# the syntactic requirements described here.
A suitable URN representation of the above FPI would be:
urn:fpi:-%2E%2ESears,%20Roebuck%20&%20Co.%2E%2ENONSGML%20TOPIC%201922%20Farm%20Catalog%20Number%20:%20R205%2E%2EEN
encoded to remove illegal characters (namely spaces and slashes).
It's also necessary to encode "#", "?", and "%" when they appear in FPIs.
These rules are documented in RFC2141, "URN Syntax".
-- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.