Subject: Re: [urn] CTS and CITE2 URNs

From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:03:17 -0600

On 3/24/19 5:03 PM, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Hello Dale, others,
> 
> On 2019/03/25 07:16, Dale R. Worley wrote:
>> The situation we are in as one of conflicing requirements:  (1) the need
>> for URNs to absolutely follow the standard (RFC 8141), and (2) the need
>> for them to be human-convenient.
>>
>> One way to square this circle would be to define two forms which are in
>> one-to-one correspondence:  If it starts with "urn:", it is in URN
>> format, and if it starts with "cts:" or "cite2:", it is in
>> human-friendly format.  For example, we could define these two strings
>> to be equivalent:
>>
>>      cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma#μῆνις
>>
>>      urn:cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma@%CE%BC%E1%BF%86%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%82
>>
>> As long as this correspondence is algorithmicly defined, it shouldn't be
>> difficult to implement.
>>
>> The latter proper URN can probably be translated into an IRI that would
>> show the final characers in the native Greek alphabet, but I don't know
>> enough about IRIs to know how that would work.
> 
> Well, it would work very easily. It would give
> 
>       urn:cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma#μῆνις
> 
> It's just the reversal of the encoding with UTF-8 and %-encoding that 
> the URN RFC specifies.

True. However, although μῆνις is what humans (who read Greek) would
prefer to see, as we all know what URI software implementations need to
process is %CE%BC%E1%BF%86%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%82 (although applications that
present the latter string to humans can display μῆνις for readability).

I talked with the registrants off list and they find it acceptable to
strictly follow RFC 8141 by making the SUBREFERENCE and all other parts
pure ASCII (i.e., percent-encoding all Unicode characters outside the
ASCII range).

With that issue solved, I think we're close to accepting this
registration, but I will review the other messages in the thread because
I know Dale had commented on several other aspects.

Peter