1.2. Design Trade-offs

To a degree much greater than when URNs were first considered and their uses outlined (see [RFC1737]), issues of persistent identifiers on the Internet involve fundamental design trade-offs that are much broader than URNs or the URN approach and even touch on open research questions within the information sciences community. Ideal and comprehensive specifications about what should be done or required across the entire universe of URNs would require general agreement about, and solutions to, a wide range of such issues. Although some of those issues were introduced by the Internet or computer-age approaches to character encodings and data abstraction, others predate the Internet and computer systems by centuries; there is unlikely to be agreement about comprehensive solutions in the near future.

Although this specification consequently contains some requirements and flexibility that would not be present in a more perfect world, this has been necessary in order to produce a consensus specification that provides a modernized definition of URNs (the unattractive alternative would have been to not modernize the definition in spite of widespread deployment).

The following sub-sections describe two of the relevant issues in greater detail.