Re: Internet-draft for URN NID "name"

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

this is a really bad idea in so many ways.

"name" is a confusing NID as it means nothing.  all URNs are names.

attempting to use human-readable strings as URNs makes naming conflicts
inevitable and invites disputes over ownership of those strings, both
within the resolution system and between those names and trademarks.  for
that reason alone it is very unlikely that the binding between a name: URN
and its resource will be able to be stable.

expecting clients to automatically insert disambiguating information such
as a country code will produce surprising and inconsistent results from one
user or client to another.  it hardly matters that the URN itself is
unambiguous
if the user interface is expected to create an inconsistency.  on the
Internet,
the notion of country is fairly arbitrary - is it the nationality of the
user (and
if he has multiple nationalities, which one?), the location of the user's
computer (shall it use GPS to determine this?), the location of the user's
PoP with his ISP, the nationality of the owner of the computer, what?

bottom line: this is exactly what URNs were not intended to be.  this
proposal should be denied with extreme prejudice.