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From: Fisher Mark <FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com>
To: "dgd@cs.bu.edu" <dgd@cs.bu.edu>, Martin J Duerst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>,
"moore@cs.utk.edu" <moore@cs.utk.edu>
Cc: "stu_weibel@oclc.org" <stu_weibel@oclc.org>,
"urn-ietf@bunyip.com" <urn-ietf@bunyip.com>
Subject: Re: [URN] Re: I18N does not belong in URNs
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 96 14:05:00 EST
Message-Id: <328B6DF5@MSMAIL.INDY.TCE.COM>
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Reply-To: Fisher Mark <FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com>
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Martin J Duerst writes:
>I have stopped proposing adding i18n support for meaningfulness.
>This argument is not necessary. But I think it is necessary that
>the same amount of meaningfulness is allowed or disallowed to
>users of any language around the globe. This is only guaranteed
>by either radically restricting the character set or completely
>opening it up.
I would further propose that if "meaninglessness" is a requirement, only
random identifiers will do. If there is a meaning present, people will use
it. I do not, however, think that URNs must necessarily have no meaning to
humans -- they may, or they may not. It is up to namespace designer. (And
there may be a _lot_ of those!)
Meanwhile, David Durand writes:
>At 5:17 PM 11/13/96, Keith Moore wrote:
>>was imprecise and possibly misleading. A better statement is:
>>
>> "URNs aren't intended to serve as human meaningful names".
>>
>>Keith
>
>This means the human meaningfulness is not a requirement of URNs. This is
>probably good. But it is _not_ as you have claimed, a requirement that URNs
>_not_ be human-readable.
>
> As I have repeatedly pointed out, compatibility with existing
>persistent namespaces will require that at least some human-meaningful
>names be included. The notion of requiring users of FPIs (for instance) to
>hex-encode 50+ character ascii strings stil strikes me a ludicrous. But
>once we allow ASCII, we have to meet the questions of the international
>community. My feeling is that transcribability is a more serious problem
>than the UTF-8 advocates are admitting. On the other hand, if the reference
>string is the %-encoded UTF-8 value, then we should be OK for
>transcribability. The issue of user-friendly software that hides %-encoding
>is not part of the protocol, so its _possibility_ shouldn't unduly
>influence us.
Although UTF-8 is not perfect, it is by far the closest system now existing
that represents most characters in use today. If we are to permit but not
require that URNs have human meanings, and we are not going to force
grandfathered namespaces to translate their IDs, then UTF-8 is likely the
best choice for a character encoding scheme, with the reference string as