Description of Entities Identified by the 'tag' URI Scheme
draft-mc-tagresolution-00
Internet Engineering Task Force M. Čermák, Ed.
Internet-Draft 9 February 2021
Intended status: Informational
Expires: 13 August 2021
Description of Entities Identified by the 'tag' URI Scheme
draft-mc-tagresolution-00
Abstract
This document specifies automated description resolution mechanism
for Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in the "tag" scheme. Tag
URIs (also known as "tags") are designed to be non-dereferenceable,
however it may be useful for a tag minter to optinally provide a
public easily accessible description of the entity associated with a
tag.
Status of This Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 13 August 2021.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Querying Information about a Tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Host-based Authority and the .well-known "tag" URI . . . 3
2.1.1. Obtaining the Archived Version of a Description . . . 4
2.2. Mail-based Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1. Assignment of .well-known 'tag' URI . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
The 'tag' Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme is described by
RFC 4151 [RFC4151]. URIs in this scheme (tags) are human-friendly
identifiers, internally consisting of 2 parts: the tagging entity (a
domain name or an e-mail address, followed by a date) and a specific
identifier (optional). The combination chosen for the tagging entity
guarantees uniqueness of tags across time and space, as long as no
unauthorized entity mints tags under an entity with a different
ownership.
Using tags as opaque identifiers in some cases is convenient for a
couple of reasons: they are simple and easily rememberable by humans,
the date component tells about the date of creation of the entity and
thus carries significant information about its relevance, and the
option of using e-mail addresses opens the possibility of minting new
tags to virtually everyone.
Use of tags in other contexts, such as in semantic web applications,
could be problematic. While dereferenceability is not a strict
requirement in those cases, it might be advantageous to have a
standardized mechanism for querying information about the entity
referred to by a specific tag, since it already contains enough
information to locate its tagging entity.
1.1. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
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2. Querying Information about a Tag
A tag URI has the following structure, in ABNF (RFC 5234 [RFC5234]):
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