Network Working Group A. B. Coates Internet-Draft No organization Expires: April 17, 2001 October 17, 2000 URN Namespace for Literate Programming: Anthony B. Coates draft-coates-urn-namespace-01.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on April 17, 2001. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document describes a URN namespace for use in identifying XML namespaces for use with applications created by the author, Anthony B. Coates. In particular, the author develops applications for literate programming. 1. Introduction XML namespaces require a URI to identify them. While URLs have commonly been used for this purpose, the recent controversy over the use of relative URLs for namespaces has highlighted the deficiency in using locators (which are generally assumed to name an actual resource) for disambiguating XML namespaces. This has moved the author to request a URN namespace with the ID "abc" (the author's Coates Expires April 17, 2001 [Page 1] Internet-Draft URN Namespace for A.B.Coates October 2000 initials). For professional reasons, the author finds himself changing continent every few years, and hence uses e-mail and Web redirection services whose domain names are not under his control, and hence are subject to change without notice. The assignment of a persistent URN would remove any inherent dependence on URLs outside of the author's control. This namespace specification is for a formal namespace. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "abc" requested. Registration Information: Registration Version Number: 2 Registration Date: 2000-10-17 Declared registrant of the namespace: Anthony B. Coates abcoates@TheOffice.net Declaration of structure: URNs in this namespace must all start with "urn:abc:YYYY:" where YYYY is the four digit year in which the URN was assigned. Otherwise, the structure is opaque. The URNs assigned by the author will have internal structure, but beyond the year of assignment, the structure is not expected to be manifestly obvious to an outside observer. The inclusion of the year of assignment as a compulsory part of the URN structure is to assure the persistence of the URNs even if the ownership of the "abc" namespace is passed on to someone else at some time in the future (perhaps on the author's death). URNs assigned in previous years cannot be clobbered by URNs assigned in the current year so long as the nominated structure is adhered to. Relevant ancillary documentation: None Identifier uniqueness considerations: Coates Expires April 17, 2001 [Page 2] The versioned and distinct nature of the resources themselves makes duplication unlikely, as does the mandatory inclusion of the year of assignment in the URNs, but in the interest of providing concrete assurances, the owner agrees to maintain a table of assigned URNs and to absolutely avoid duplication by consulting that table before each new URN is published. Identifier persistence considerations: For the most part, the persistence of the URNs in this namespace is guaranteed by the mandatory inclusion of the year of assignment in each URN. Otherwise, to the best of the namespace owner's ability, the usability of URNs will last as long as the resources they identify are reasonably useful. Process of identifier assignment: Assignment is limited to the owner and those authorities that are specifically designated by the owner. Process of identifier resolution: The owner will distribute catalogs (e.g., OASIS Open TR9401 Catalogs) that map the subset of URNs considered useful to resource identifiers (e.g., URLs). The owner will authorise resolution services as necessary. Rules for Lexical Equivalence: URNs are lexically equivalent if they are lexically identical (case-sensitive comparison). Conformance with URN Syntax: No special considerations. Validation mechanism: None specified. The owner will publish the table of assigned URNs online. Scope: Global 3. Examples The following examples are not guaranteed to be real, but indicate the anticipated format of the author's URNs. Coates Expires April 17, 2001 [Page 3] Internet-Draft URN Namespace for A.B.Coates October 2000 urn:abc:2000:litprog:xmLP:beta:2000-09-06:tangle urn:abc:2001:litprog:xmLP:2.1:2001-09-06:weave urn:abc:2000:litprog:source:text:plain:Java:1.3 urn:abc:2000:litprog:source:text:xml:XSLT:1.0:2000-08-01 4. Security Considerations There are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. References [1] Walsh, N., "A URN Namespace for Norman Walsh", July 2000. [2] Knuth, D. E., "Literate Programming", CSLI Lecture Notes 27, 1992. [3] Goldfarb, C. F., "ISO (International Organization for Standardization) ISO 8879:1986(E) Information Processing -- Text and Office Systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)", 1986. [4] W3C, XML WG, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0", February 1998, . [5] W3C, Namespaces WG, "Namespaces in XML", January 1999, . [6] OASIS, Entity Mgmt. TC, "Entity Management: OASIS Technical Resolution 9401:1997 (Amendment 2 to TR 9401)", January 1994, . [7] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. [8] Mealling, M. and R. Daniel, "URI Resolution Services Necessary for URN Resolution", RFC 2483, January 1999. Author's Address Anthony B. Coates No organization 92 Middlesex St London E1 7EZ United Kingdom Phone: +44 20 7377 6211 EMail: abcoates@TheOffice.net URI: http://www.theoffice.net/abcoates/ Coates Expires April 17, 2001 [Page 4] Internet-Draft URN Namespace for A.B.Coates October 2000 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved. 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