On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 09:27:58AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Thu, 25 Jul 2002 18:45:00 EDT, Keith Moore said: > > > All naming systems start with some context; otherwise they'd be trying to > > impose a tree structure on the entire universe. restricting DNS URNs > > to the real DNS is a reasonable design compromise. > > Agreed. > > The part I obviously am unable to get caffeinated enough to understand is > what purpose the timestamps serve - there's *no* way to know what the > value of turing-police.cc.vt.edu:01July2002 was (don't bother with 'dig', > that will get the the IP address of its docking station, which changed > recently - the laptop's been seen at lots of different IP addresses). > > Or is the intent *NOT* to provide something that's resolvable/usable, but > to provide an audit trail of "the URN as it resolved at timestamp FOO" (a > la the Wayback Machine)? Correct. They very explicitly don't want these things to be resolvable but are mearly using then as unique tokens for disambiguating pieces of XML namespaces. They could just as easily use UUIDs but those have issues with uniqueness if you don't happen to have a MAC address handy. And they're awfully cryptic and very prone to transcription errors... -MM -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Mealling | Vote Libertarian! | urn:pin:1 michael@neonym.net | | http://www.neonym.net