The IETF has in fact already got a URN defined for its documents, it
is just not a locatable identifier at the current time.
I used the URN form of the documents in XKMS to specify the protocol
that a key is being requested for use with. That is one case where you
want to have a fixed identifier that is unambiguous. A URL does not
achieve that.
In theory we could use NAPTR records to disambiguate this form of URN
to a URL. But this is not very satisfactory as NAPTR essentially
introduces a re-ex capability into DNS retrieval. That is a good deal
more power than makes me for one comfortable.
A simpler solution would be to insert the existing URNs into the
documents and leave it to the people who develop tools for converting
them into HTML with links to do something intelligent with the URNs.
Which is not that difficult since the URNs will all be links to IETF
documents in any case.
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