2.3. Optional Components

This specification includes three optional components in the URN syntax. They are known as r-component, q-component, and f-component and are described in more detail below. Because this specification focuses almost exclusively on URN syntax, it does not define detailed semantics of these components for URNs in general. However, each of these components has a distinct role that is independent of any given URN and its URN namespace. It is intended that clients will be able to handle these components uniformly for all URNs. These components MAY be used with URNs from existing URN namespaces, whether or not a URN namespace explicitly supports them. However, consistent with the approach taken in RFC 3986, the behavior of a URN that contains components that are undefined or meaningless for a particular URN namespace or resource is not defined. The following sections describe these optional components and their interpretation in greater detail.