Identifiers 2.0 new internal WD

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Registry WG,

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 03:34:16PM +0100, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> Frankly, I'm not quite sure why we should go into the trouble of
> overriding all the perfectly good BNF from RFC 3986.  Sure, we should
> put some restrictions (nothing funny in the authorities, no queries
> and fragments in whatever you resolve in a registry,...), but I'd
> think we should say "IVORNs are run-of-the-mill RFC 3986-type URIs,
> *except* (a), (b), and (c)" rather than trying to pretend Identifiers
> could possibly work without RFC 3986.
> 
> Now, that would finally be a complete rewrite of the document, and
> before I even embark on the journey there:

Because nobody protested back in winter, I've gone ahead and followed
that program in volute revisions 2920 (sorry for the sheer size of
the diff) and 2926.  For a formatted PDF, head to

http://docs.g-vo.org/Identifiers.pdf

Despite the massive changes, the specification content has not
changed much.  To get a quick idea of what this is about, please have
a look at section 1.3 ("Rationale for Version 2") and the entire
section 4 (and I'd really appreciate if you could find that time for
that).

Also, since that section 2 is almost all-new, I would be especially
grateful if standards lawyers could have a closer look at that (I'm
trying hard to not stare towards Glasgow too obtrusively now).

If you won't find time to do that within, say, two weeks, please let
me know -- otherwise I'd submit that as a WD after another round of
proof-reading by mid-May so there's some time for the rest of the
IVOA to have a look at it before Sesto.

Again, feel free to commit contributions of all sorts directly to
volute -- that's what version control is for.


Until then, I'd have another look at the Registry Interfaces revision
(mentioning RofR, in particular); incidentally, I'm planning to
downgrade that to a minor version (i.e., 1.1), as now that RegTAP is
no longer a part of it we're not formally breaking anything major as
far as I can see.  Objections and contributions are welcome here,
too, at any time.

Thanks,

        Markus