UriForBook/UseUrn - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Should I start embedding URNs in my HTML?

In response to What is a definitive URI for books?, BruceDarcus pointed me to using URNs as identifiers. e.g., urn:isbn:0520237048, noting that both ISBNs and ISSNs are registered URNs. I didn't give URNs a serious look because I had actually never seen any "real support" for them. That is, I can write urn:isbn:0520237048, but what would that do?

Still, Bruce's email prompted me to take a closer look, which led to Ben Meadowcroft's URNs, citations in web authoring:

This article covers the techniques authors on the web can use to reference articles and publications in a robust manner. It was written to highlight some of the inadequeces of relying on non persistant URI references for academic and technical papers. It was partially born out of my considerations on holistic hypertext and how this could be integrated into both CMS and KMS.

which I found via URN, some URI scheme - Anne’s Weblog about Markup & Style.

I learned two interesting things:

the cite attribute for blockquote and q in XHTML 1.0
that although there doesn't yet to be widespread support for URNs in browsers, there is an URN Support extension for Mozilla/Firefox, which worked for Ben Meadowcroft.

I installed the extension and clicking on a urn:isbn led to the corresponding amazon.com page.

Here I provide my example:

Introduction to California Plant Life: Nearly one-fourth of the plants found in North America north of Mexico, and more than are found in any other state, grow in California.

Clicking on the name of the book does not lead anywhere in most browsers because there is no native support for URNs, but any bot/search engine reading my wiki can now pick up on the ISBN, stated in a RDF-friendly way.

One might find the default linking of the browser extension to amazon.com rather ironic. There's a lot of jumping through hoops to write URNs, which then gets directed by the browser extension to where people are already linking to in the first place. But note that the decoupling of the identifier from the locator does make the important statement that ISBNs are not synonymous with amazon.com and allows for other explicit aasociations to be made. For instance, the extension could be rewritten to make links to the Library of Congress instead.

I'm still mulling how to make practical use of URNs....