Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/urn/urn-archives/urn-ietf.archive.9611/000043_owner-urn-ietf _Tue Nov 5 19:58:21 1996.msg

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Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 16:57:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Terry Allen <[e-mail]>
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To: [e-mail], [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [URN] I18N does not belong in URNs
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Reply-To: Terry Allen <[e-mail]>
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Keith Moore writes:
| Support for UTF-8 in URNs is a gross layering violation.  It also
| violates the requirements of RFC 1737 in several ways:
|
| URNs are not intended to be meaningful to humans.  Rather, the desire
| for URNs to have a long lifetime indicates that they should not be
| human-friendly; otherwise, semantic drift will cause those names to
| need to be changed over time.

Our longest-lived names actually are meaningful to humans; to support
your argument you have to establish that semantic drift affects
names specifically (Moby Dick, Julius Caesar, Assurnasirpal) and
that using them in the context of a defined name space does not
insulate them from semantic drift.  However, I'm still undecided
on using Unicode at all, as I'm sure I don't understand some of
the issues.  I'll be meeting with Ron tomorrow and will hope
to be wiser after that.

| URNs need to have global scope and to be transcribable.  Few people on
| this planet could accurately transcribe more than a small percentage
| of UTF-8.  Even those that could transcribe it could probably not type
| most UTF-8 characters on their keyboards.  It's also completely
| unacceptable to expect people to have a graphical display and hunt
| through character menus just to type in a URN.

Few people on this planet can accurately transcribe anything.  Your
last point would have merit were it not that we absolutely must
be able to grandfather in existing name spaces.

| UTF-8 cannot be transported unmodified in common Internet protocols.
| Even if some of those protocols are being upgraded to support more
| charsets, it will be many years before UTF-8 can be transported safely
| by these tools.

That's an argument specifically against using UTF-8 at all.  I'd
like to hear more on this point from the UTF-8 proponents.

| URNs should not be in any language, not even English.  I would
| enthusiastically support requiring all URNs to be in a restricted
| character set or otherwise discourage human friendliness (though due
| to grandfathering requirements, each URN scheme would need its own
| rules for ensuring this).

That's an absolute show-stopper, if you are asking that existing
naming schemes develop encryption methods to transform their names
into unreadable strings.  People just won't do it because they
will see it as unreasonable and unnecessary.

We should be building the big tent that everyone can live under,
not trying to close out name spaces we don't like.  If we were
to discourage readability we would find URNs ignored by
users of at least some name spaces, and we would no longer have
the unified noncolliding name space we presently contemplate.

Some name spaces will turn out not to work well, whether on
the Internet, in general, or after several centuries.  Users
of those name spaces will have to cope or convert to other
name spaces with better characteristics.  That's life.

| But incorporating UTF-8 in an attempt to make URNs human-readable is
| an absolute showstopper.

I didn't understand that to be the point of it; I would agree
that if the only reason for using Unicode were to make URNs
readable that wouldn't be a sufficient reason for using it;
but I'm not sure that we can't just append existing names in
their natural coded character set as the NSS part of a URN,
which would have mixed results for readability.  (But then
I feel sure I haven't understood all the implications
of that approach.)



Regards,
    Terry Allen    Fujitsu Software Corp.    [e-mail]
"In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
 which we soon find outselves obliged to destroy?" - Benjamin Franklin
  A Davenport Group Sponsor:  http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html