URNs and URCs

[George Michaelson]

There is a compelling awfulness about URLs. like usr@host once you
understand the structure, its workable for most cases. I believe What URN/URI
seek to do is provide functionality not do-able in URL's. Principally to
provide long-term locators mapping to short-term instances, account for
replication and shadow/caching, and keyword/other complex searches in
a more optimal fashion than lycos-like "go and robot-browse to find words
to hold in 1 place" forms of searching.

These are laudible goals. The one ray of hope here is that librarians and
people who are professionals in indexing/searching are in the loop. X.500
which also holds some of these goals has been a total, utter unmitigated
disaster. (I know. I've did code in it, from 1986 to around 1990) The
success rate in providing global coverage has been massively lower than
predicted, and thats just for email details, even though X.500 has much
more global scope and purpose (like secure key distribution)
  
X.500 may yet rescue itself. LDAP etc being something netscape now are
behind which means explosive growth into peoples hands, and a reasonably
sane implementation even if not very standard conformant based on what
they did to HTML :-)

I really hope URN/URI doesn't get bogged down the way X.500 directory did.

I found a comment at AUUG/APWWW intrigueing. It attempted to asses the 
bitcost of sending http://www. in front of all those URL's. I must admit
that I think quietly dropping www. would make a lot of sense, and for
99% of the time, the press stuff up http:// anyway...

URI will not be "compact" in the sense URL's are. URN will be much more
compact but less friendly. I expect that we will all wind up using all of
them in a blend, depending on circumstances. Much as we use ISBN when
lodging orders with people who understand ISBN, use a short title when
context supports it, and a proper citation when the journal demands it.

-George

--
George Michaelson         |  connect.com.au pty/ltd
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