IETF URI Working Group Paul E. Hoffman Internet-Draft Proper Publishing draft-ietf-uri-urc-trivial-00 Ron Daniel, Jr. Expires October 21, 1995 Los Alamos National Laboratory Trivial URC Syntax: urc0 Status of this memo This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Internet-Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It s not appropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a "working draft" or "work in progress." To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained n the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net, nic.nordu.net, ftp.isi.edu or munnari.oz.au. Abstract This document defines a trivial, machine-parsable Uniform Resource Citiation (URC) syntax that can be returned from the resolution of Uniform Resource Names (URNs). The syntax, called urc0, is also appropriate for any program that can return URCs. More sophisticated URC schemes will be developed later. urc0 is intended to be the simplest possible machine-parsable representation of a URC. This document does not cover any specific resolution schemes or the syntax for URNs. It is expected that these issues (and other URN-related topics) will be covered in different Internet Drafts submitted to the IETF URI Working Group. 1. Introduction As explained in [URC], the purpose or function of a URC is to provide a vehicle or structure for the representation of URIs and their associated metainformation. It is expected that the syntax of some URCs may be quite complex in order to meet the needs of various Internet communities such as librarians, archivists, and researchers. However, not all URCs must have a complex structure. At present, it is not known who will produce and read URCs. Although more advanced URCs may be created by computer programs with the intention of them only being read and parsed by other programs, it is clear that some URCs will be written by people and that some will be read as plain text by people. Even these URCs should be machine-parsable in order for some Internet users to get the most value out of them. The URC syntax here, called "urc0", is easy to type and read by people. It is also trivial to parse by even the most simple programs. 2. Format URCs in the urc-0 Syntax The format for urc-0 URCs is: *[
[]] Each part starts with a header that has the following form: =====[[/]] is the character set used in the metainformation. The value for the field is one of "US-ASCII" or "ISO-8859-x", where "x" is a digit in the range "1" through "9". If not specified, the default is "US-ASCII". is the language used in the metainformation. The value for the field is a language identification tag described in [LANG]. If not specified, the default is "x-unspecified". The returned URL must conform to [URL]. If the URL is more than one line long, it must begin with the characters "" character, as described in [URL]. The optional metainformation may be of any format and contain any text. The only restriction is that no line of the metainformation may begin with the characters "=====". 3. Examples of URCs Using the urc-0 Syntax A URC that has a single URL and no metainformation might look like: ===== ftp://elm.wnln.edu/pub/mirrors/phone-list.txt A URC that has a URL on multiple lines might look like: ===== A URC that has a multiple URLs might look like: ===== ftp://elm.wnln.edu/pub/mirrors/phone-list.txt ===== ftp://gagu.bigstate.edu/admin/phones.html A URC that has a multiple URLs with metainformation might look like: ===== ftp://elm.wnln.edu/pub/mirrors/phone-list.txt This is the most up-to-date version of the WNLN-Bigstate phone list. It is maintained by Cheryl O'Donnell. =====US-ASCII/en ftp://gagu.bigstate.edu/admin/phones.html This is the mirror of the first URL at Bigstate. 4. Security Implications Although there are security implications in transmitting URCs, there are no security implications in defining one of their syntaxes. 5. References [LANG] RFC 1766, "Tags for the Identification of Languages". [URC] Internet-Draft, "URC Scenarios and Requirements". The name of the draft at the time of this writing is "draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01". [URL] RFC 1738, "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)". 6. Author Contact Information Paul E. Hoffman Proper Publishing 127 Segre Place Santa Cruz, CA, USA 95060 voice: (408) 426-6222 phoffman@proper.com Ron Daniel Jr. MS B287 Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, NM, USA 87545 voice: (505) 665-0597 fax: (505) 665-4939 rdaniel@lanl.gov