Subject: Re: who wants URNs, was horse left the barn (fwd)

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Jul 2015 13:11:29 +1200

>In addition to some other things for which it may be desirable to round 
>up proposals, we have something we allege to be better in the form of 
>"urn:ietf:rfc:2648" (as described in, RFC 2648). When can we expect those 
>identifiers to start appearing explicitly in the RFC Index and metadata 
>and in at least references to RFCs within newly-issued documents in the 
>RFC Series?

If you'll review the extensive correspondence on this topic, you'll find 
that the motivation for adding DOIs was that some IETFers, particularly 
those in academia, said they make it easier to cite RFCs in contexts 
outside the IETF, and (with any luck) to get them considered relevant to 
academic promotion and tenure decisions.

I don't ever recall anyone saying that URNs address a comparable problem 
in the outside world.  Having written the code that adds DOIs to the RFC 
indexes, I can say that there's no technical bar to adding URNs or 
anything else, but unless there is an actual problem to be solved, it 
doesn't strike me as a good use of our time or money.

R's,
John