Subject: Re: [urn] Consensus Question Regarding Direction of Work

From: Andrew Newton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 16:40:01 -0400

It looks like I never officially declared consensus on this. So to put
this to rest and set the direction of the working group, it is my
opinion that we have rough consensus to proceed with changing the
semantics of URN components while trying to remain syntactically
compatible with URIs.

-andy

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Andrew Newton <[email-masked]> wrote:
> During our recently completed meeting in Toronto at IETF 90, we
> achieved necessary consensus from the meeting participants to focus
> our energies on the semantics of the components of URNs with a hopeful
> goal of keeping syntax compatible with URIs. In other words, the
> separation of URNs from URIs is to be about semantics instead of
> syntax (the implication being that we are not wholly separating URNs
> from URIs).
>
> The driving mechanism for this work will be a revision to the
> separation Internet-Draft as mentioned by John Klensin. That draft may
> or may not turn into an RFC depending on the needed changes to
> 2141bis.
>
> As is IETF practice, I am seeking input from individuals on this
> mailing list regarding this decision. Specifically, I am seeking
> objections that have not been previously raised.
>
> -andy
> co-chair

---

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:37:26 -0400

> From: Andrew Newton <[email-masked]>
> 

It seems to me that the consensus (though quite rough) is moving
toward:

- Remaining syntactically compatible with URIs (RFC 3986).

- Being upward-compatible with the status quo URN syntax (RFC 2141).

- Defining "generic" syntactic extensions to URNs that are analogous
  to "path segment", "query", and "fragment" in URIs, but placing
  little or no syntactic constraint on their components.

- Minimizing the semantic constraints we place on these extensions.

- Explicitly delegating the definition of the semantics and detailed
  syntax of these extensions to the NID definitions.

Dale