Re: CHAT: Need a word for these!

Christophe Grandsire wrote:


> What's the use of urn:? I've never seen it in my life.

It is not yet much used, but allows one to give a name to a resource
that is independent of its location.  For example,

urn:newsml:reutershealth.com:20020129:elin005:1 refers to

a specific version of a specific Reuters Health article,
without regard to where it might be located on some particular
Web site, FTP server, or even printed newspaper.

For another example, urn:isbn:0-201-61633-5 refers to a specific
book (_The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0_).

A third example is the HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD (which
describes the structure of HTML documents), which is named
urn:publicid:-:W3C:DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional:EN .

In general urn: URIs can't be used in browsers unless a specific
resolver for the "namespace" (the part between "urn:" and the next
colon) is available.  These namespaces are maintained in a registry
at http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces .


> In France, V is used for the potential itself. Potential differences are marked
> by U, so that we don't mistake potential (defined relative to an arbitrary
> constant) to electromotive force (defined absolutely).

Ah, clever.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_