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Re: DNS based URI without any set access semantics?

2002-07-26 06:54:56
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 - 

A URN is supposed to be uniquely bound to a single resource for all time.
however a DNS name is not uniquely bound to an assigning entity for all time.

say party A holds example.com at time T1, and 
party B holds example.com at time T2.  

if there is a URN scheme based on DNS names without timestamps, then 
unless A and B explciitly coordinate, there's a chance of a collision 
between names assigned by A using example.com and names assigned by
B using example.com.  but if the scheme requires DNS name owners to
include a timestamp in a uniform format, then A uses 
URN:dns:example.com:T1 and B uses URN:dns:example.com:T2 .

also if you're trying to resolve those URNs, it helps if there's an
easy way to distinguish names assigned by A and those assigned by B.

the timestamp doesn't have any significance for the resource itself -
it's just a way of disambiguating potentially-conflicting uses of the
same domain name.