The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Uniform Resource Names (URNs)' (draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn-22.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Uniform Resource Names, Revised Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Alexey Melnikov, Ben Campbell and Alissa Cooper. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc2141bis-urn/ Technical Summary This document defines "Uniform Resource Name", a URI that is assigned under the "urn" URI scheme and a particular URN namespace, with the intent that the URN will be a persistent, location-independent resource identifier. With regard to URN syntax, this document defines the canonical syntax for URNs (in a way that is consistent with URI syntax), specifies methods for determining URN-equivalence, and discusses URI conformance. With regard to URN namespaces, this document specifies a method for defining a URN namespace and associating it with a namespace identifier, and describes procedures for registering namespace identifiers with IANA. This document obsoletes RFCs 2141 and 3406. The document is defining a standard, and is therefore submitted to the Standards Track as a Proposed Standard. Working Group Summary The life of this document and the URNbis working group that produced it has been long and troubled. Over the six years since the work started, the document has been reviewed by a fair number of people, but they have come and gone over those years. What remains is a stalwart, relatively small group -- on the order of ten participants -- who have stuck it through and continue to comment. That stalwart group comprises essentially the entire community within the IETF that cares how this comes out, which is a good sign. A few people who were active participants some time ago have gone silent over the last year or so, and they could resurface during IETF last call. Yet that stalwart group disagrees on many things, which fact has resulted in a six-year process for something that we expected to take more like two. It doesn't make much sense to try to list specific topics for which there was disagreement. What makes more sense is to note that most of the active participants were on a conference call at the end of June 2016, and that that call resulted in discussion of and plans for resolution of all the significant disagreements that remained. It took the authors a number of months to be able to allocate the time to go through and make the agreed-upon changes, but that call showed that the working group really was able to work together, compromise when necessary, and come up with something everyone could live with, even if it wasn't their preferred solution. The resulting document is a solid piece of work that does have rough consensus of the working group and accomplishes what the working group set out to do. One point that does merit pointing out is the relationship of this document to RFC 3986 (which defines URIs, and which is a key related document). There were discussions of deviating from 3986 or not, and how far, if so. There were discussions of what the concepts of URI fragments and query strings can mean with respect to URNs, whether to allow them, and how to handle them, if so. There were discussions of what to say about whether and when URNs might be resolvable, and what that would mean. In the end, while there remains some level of disagreement about some of that, the current document represents a consensus view on the resolution of those discussions. Document Quality URNs are used in many places, in particular as XML namespace URIs and more generally when using persistent identifiers in documents. The document is mostly updating IANA registration policy (which doesn't affect implementations) and making URNs more flexible as far as their use with fragment identifiers, etc. Personnel Barry Leiba is the document shepherd; Alexey Melnikov is the responsible Area Director.
