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To: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: An idea for MID and CID URsomethings 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 23 Jul 1995 22:08:52 +0200."
             <199507232008.WAA00170@dale.uninett.no> 
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 21:50:36 -0400
From: Roy Fielding <fielding@beach.w3.org>

I don't know what "drums" is, but I'll assume that this is appropriate
since Harald says so.

I had many discussions with Ed about the last CID draft, and they also
apply to this one.  Rather than spamming the list, I hope that people
who are interested can look at them in the hypertext archive of the URI list.
The relevant URLs are:

<URL:http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URI/archive/uri-95q1.messages/0129.html>
<URL:http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URI/archive/uri-95q1.messages/0135.html>
<URL:http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URI/archive/uri-95q1.messages/0144.html>

These three messages define several versions of a complete BNF for
the cid and mid URIs, and contain references to Ed's draft and
other comments.

>    These references are not Uniform Resource Locators, since they do
>    not encode the location of their objects, neither are they Uniform
>    Resource Names, since they do not fulfil all requirements of RFC
>    1737; for lack of a better idea, I call them Reasonably Unique
>    Identifying Names; this term obviously does not have a four-letter
>    abbreviation.

Yuck, just call them URIs -- the distinction between URLs and URNs
was an artificial creation of the URI WG, and only led to trouble.

Also, I think both cid and mid should be defined in one draft, sharing
the same BNF.  I prefer this one:


    midurl = "mid" ":" encoded-addr              ; RFC 822 Message-ID
    cidurl = "cid" ":" encoded-addr              ; RFC 1521 Content-ID

    encoded-addr = local-part "@" domain-part    ; globally unique

    local-part = 1*mchar
    domain-part = 1*mchar

    mchar = uchar | ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "&" | "="
    uchar = <as defined in RFC 1738>


Also note that the encoded-addr should not include the "<" and ">"
delimiters normally associated with Content-ID and Message-ID.


 ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
                      Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
                      (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)