Subject: Re: [urn] A few quick thoughts on "lex" (was" Re: continued use of [email-masked] list)

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:14:35 -0500

John C Klensin <[email-masked]> writes:
> I draw two conclusions for the above.  FIrst, there are a lot of
> issues, some related to legal documents, some to URN (or URI)
> niceties, and some to authority, that the document just does not
> have sorted out yet.  Second, the IETF may be appropriate as a
> place to sort out the best syntax model for registering an
> established name space as a URN-embedded namespace, but we
> should not be in the business of recognizing or ratifying naming
> authorities, especially in areas we know almost nothing about
> (either technically or in terms of socio-political
> relationships).  [etc.]

All of this is very well-said.

Experience shows that the IETF is not a good forum to address issues
traditionally handled by librarians.

It seems to me that there are two ways to proceed with this document.

One way is to provide proper references to a sufficiently universal
association/authority of legal scholarship/librarianship/legislation
that has examined and approved the underlying naming system, so that the
IETF can be assured that the system as a whole has been examined and
approved by people who are subject-matter experts.

A second way is to consider this to be an experimental proposal.  Then
we can approve the publication of the current state of the proposal in
order to inform the public, but leave the long-term development of the
system to ITTIG or whoever.

However, assuming that we proceed with the second method, there are some
issues that must be resolved.

1) The syntax as presented in the draft produces URNs which are not
accepted by the syntax of RFC 3986, even if we extend 3986 with the
query and fragment syntax of 2396.  (This is a critical technical
requirement.)

2) The authorities that govern certain elements of the syntax are
neither specified clearly or flagged as requiring further work.  For
example, the jurisdiction codes seem to be intended to be ISO 3166
Alpha-2 codes with assorted exceptions, but how the exceptions are
defined is not made clear.  Similarly, how the codes for
non-nation-state entities are allocated is unclear.  The proposal seems
to allow for <jurisdiction-code>s to be reassigned, requiring wholesale
reassignment of URNs.  This is contrary to the principles of URN
assignment.  (The reassignment of codes is a critical technical
requirement.)

3) The discussion of <jurisdiction-unit> gives as examples
"br:governo:decreto", "br;sao.paulo:governo:decreto", and
"br;sao.paulo;campinas:governo: decreto".  But none of these conform to
the provided syntax -- ":" is not permitted in <jurisdiction-unit>, and
" " is not permitted in URIs.  I believe that this is simply an
oversight, and that the intended examples are "br", "br;sao.paulo", and
"br;sao.paulo;campinas".  But the fact that such an error has been made
in the text suggests that the proposal has not been carefully edited.
The proposal needs to be edited to be free of easily-visible errors as a
demonstration that sufficient care has been taken in composing its text.
(This is a matter of assuring the quality of the proposal document.)

4) The handling of characters outside of the 26-letter Latin alphabet
seems to be philosophically contrary to internationalization.  Indeed,
the approach of requesting that all elements which are derived from
natural language be turned into sequences of Latin letters is what I
would expect a naive American to propose!  In contrast, the URI system
provides a method of encoding the full Unicode character set.  (Albeit
this encoding is visually ugly, it is uniquely mappable to and from a
representation of the URI with the escapes represented by the glyphs
they represent -- the latter representation is visually compatible with
the original natural language.)  Similarly, the DNS system (via
Punycode) provides a method of encoding the full Unicode character set
as components of DNS labels.  And modern computer systems seem to
commonly support the full Unicode character set.  These considerations
taken together suggest to me that an international legal reference
system should express that the glyphs of all writing systems are equal.
(This is a matter of supporting the IETF's principles of
internationalism.)

Dale