urn

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An urn is used to store the ashes of cremated people, however URN is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Name, specified as a kind of URI, yet later abandoned by the URL Standard (which also deprecates URI & IRI), and historically often a source of dead links, ironically aligned with the original common noun.

History

At some point (citation and date-range needed) URN was part of three pieces of naming / identifying / locating things on the internet:

• URI = URL + URN

Before that there was proposal to use the term URC (Uniform Resource Characteristics)

• See: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-uri-urn2urc-00

Even older than that, Tim Berners-Lee had proposed the term UDI (Universal Document Identifier).

• See: How URL started as UDI for details and more links

See Also

• https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Previously: RFC 1738 - URL
• RFC 2141 - URN