Comments on requirements draft-02 motivations

[gwachob@visa.com]

Drummond-

Comments on the requirements motivations section. Overall its fine - here' some specific comments. 

  -Gabe


line 83: whats the "layer 1"? I'm not sure what you mean here. Whats the difference between linking and naming? Also, the stacking of URN on top of URL is perhaps contentious. The offical "modern view" is that URNs and URLs are mostly non-overlapping and they are both subsets of the space of URIs. URLs are actually not formally defined anywhere (some people think HTTP URIs when you say URLs, some think its exactly the same as URIs, some think its some category of URIs that have a machine address in them)

line 88-89: the description of IP should talk about "between other machine-level networking protocols" - probably better to say "between local networks" 

line 99-102: URNs are NOT web-resolvable URLs. Some argue that the non-resolvability of URNs is whats held them up from being used. Us providing at least a basic resolutoin mechanism will make 

line 116-122: I think you aren't addressing the real problem with URNs (or I'm not following you). I'm not sure the problem is best stated as that they are hard to use for humans. I think the problem you are getting at is that there is an inherent tension between the persistence of URNs and the transitivity of human understanding of terms. There are certainly non-transient things that can be identified by URNs (ie a particular SENSE of a word - like "bare" can mean "undressed" or it can mean "plain"). So the problem is that the symbols humans are used to have inherent non-persistence and "imprecision" that are in conflict with the precision and permanence of URNs.

lines 143-148: the "postal mail to the bathroom" example is a little strained. Perhaps the concept of addressing to a corporate role (ie "President") is more illustrative (ie to addess mail to "President, XYZ Corp, 123 Main St, Anywhere, CA, 94001)