IETF Gurus, I'm looking for a URN scheme that uses DNS for uniqueness (perhaps in conjunction with a date) but doesn't have any attached semantics. I'm asking this beacuse XML has the "duck" problem. It uses URIs for namespace names, but only the URI syntax (for uniqueness), thus you see lots of http:// namespace names but the author never intended to support the retrieval of content given the namespace name. Anyway, this is icky. What XML really wanted was a URN that is based on DNS. As it turns out YAML (http://yaml.org) has exactly the same situation, only we are in a position to do this correctly. So, I was thinking something like... dnsurn://clarkevans.com/2002/my-data-type#my-format Thus, the scheme follows *exactly* the syntax of HTTP (to keep learning curve down) only that the date is required immediately following the domain name. The advantage of this over http is that it doesn't look like a duck... "dnsurn" is not "http". A further advantage is that someone can use everything to the right of the dnsurn: as a http: URL if they wish by just replacing the scheme. I'm completely dogged for time... if something like this is possible how hard would it be? I'm not looking forward to having the equivalent of "XML namespaces considered harmful" threads on our YAML list and thing something like this would serve to help not only YAML but also XML... Best, Clark