Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Better internationalization support

[Laszlo K. <las...@Su...>]

> In December, I posted an alternative approach
> using URNs.  I didn't get any response at the time,
> perhaps because my mail was so long.  8^)
> A URN is human comprehensible, can be generated
> locally without tools, and, by following a simple
> namespace convention, can be globally unique.
> 
> The syntax of a URN is:
> 
>    urn:namespaceID:documentID
> 
> The "urn:" part is fixed, and the other two parts
> are assigned by the document originator.
> Each organization can define its own namespaceID,
> and then they just need to keep their own documentIDs
> unique within that namespace.
> 
> The key to global uniqueness is ensuring that
> each namespaceID is unique.  This can generally
> be achieved today by following the convention
> of using their own IP name, such as apache.org
> or ldp.org.  If an individual lacks an IP name, they can apply
> to OMF to register their documents under the omf.org
> namespace.
> 
> So the LDP could use URNs such as:
> 
> urn:ldp.org:SysAdminG
> urn:ldp.org:ls.man.1
> etc.
> 
> I've attached my original mail which provides further
> background information and references on URNs.

I read that email back in December, but this explanation above seems to
clarify loads of things. I think I like this idea. At the bottom of your
previous email you suggested that omf should be the namespace for every
document handled by Scrollkeeper. I think it would be better if this
would be named after the organization or project who produces the ID.
Like urn:gnome:... or urn:kde:... . If we use omf for namespace then I
think we will need to validate the URNs used by developers of various
projects, while otherwise this would be done by them. We just need to
publish a description about how the URNs should be created.

If we do it like this then we just have to publish this recommendation
and we are done. And I can start development:-)

Note that I still see this mainly as support for identifying a doc and
all its translations uniquely. So these documents should all hold the
same id. Therefore using the <identifier> tag from OMF might not be the
best for this as the only way I can figure out that this is the ID that
is the same for the doc and all its translations is that it begins with
the word "urn". If we want to use URNs later for something else then we
would be in trouble, I think. It could be something like
urn:translation:... so we know that this URN is for translation
identification. In which case only the last part of the URN is available
to identify the doc and that might not be enough to keep the uniqueness
of the ID. 

But I really think generally this is the way to go.

Thoughts?

Laszlo