> | > | date date in the form YYYYMMDD (exactly 8 digits) > | > > | > I was thinking just a year as most registries renew once > | > a year. In particular, how about allowing a person to use > | > year YYYY if they are the valid domain name holder at > | > exactly midnight January 1st of that year. > | > | the year is not precise enough as domain ownership doesn't change on > | year boundaries, and domain ownership can change more than once in a > | year. > > Ok. How about just YYYY iff YYYYMMDD would be YYYY0101 I don't like it; it makes it harder to parse with NAPTR. > | > I see no problem with it being human readable. The point is > | > that there isn't a protocol associated with the URI, not that > | > it is a pain to remember. If it is a pain to remember, no one > | > will use it. In this case, why even use DNS? The problem is > | > that I need globally unique URIs that are easy to remember and > | > that don't imply a particular protocol, like http. > | > | you're trying to use the wrong tool, then. URNs are intended to to be > | globally unique and to keep their bindings forever. making them human > | meaningful degrades their ability to fulfill that function, because > | the meaning of human languages changes over time. > > Yes, but this is what the date does. It means what it did > on the date specified. no. the date is just there to disambiguate multiple uses of the same dns name by different assignment authorities; it says nothing about the resource at all, not even when the name was assigned. if I had owned the name indecency.org on March 15 1995, and had subsequently given up ownership, I could still assign names using urn:dns:indecency.org:19950315:suffix even if I no longer owned the name. (though I can imagine that IPR lawyers would strongly object ... which might be an argument in favor of encoding the name+date with MD5, or it might be an argument in favor of shooting IPR lawyers... or both.) > Exactly. > > I'm just after a simple thing; a DNS based identifier that > isn't associated with a given protocol. How people use the > identifier is up to them. not if it's a URN; there are restrictions on how URNs are to be used. > On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 05:25:53PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > | > On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 01:31:11PM -0700, Karl Auerbach wrote: > | > | That's not a solid foundation for uniqueness. There are multiple DNS > | > | spaces in use. One is almost completely dominant, but others do exist > | > > | > It's good enough. > | > | OK... why do we want to datestamp it in case it changes owners, but > | it's "good enough" to discard the existence of alternate DNS roots? > > So do we need a mechanism to specify which DNS roots someone is using? NO. nothing stops people from reusing URNs; they're just violating protocol if they do so and in turn violating the assumptions made by people and software that rely on the properties of URNs. similarly nothing stops people from setting up their own DNS roots, they're just violating the DNS protocol if they do so, and they're violating the assumptions that a tremendous amount of software and a huge community of users rely on. trying to define a protocol for people who insist on violating protocols is a fools' errand. Keith