[BioPython] bioperl idl

[Jeffrey Chang]

[Andrew Dalke, talking about URN's]

Even more general is RFC 2396, the internet draft standard for URI's,
Uniform Resource Identifiers.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/rfc2396.txt

The URI standard is syntactically a superset of, and includes the
semantics of both URL's, information about where to find an object, and
URN's, information about what an object is.  The advantage of using URI's
is that it's compatible with existing URL's, and can be replaced by URN's
as necessary. 

I don't know if URI's will take off.  However, in XML, URI's are the
preferred way to reference external information that's either
inappropriate to reproduce or hard to encode (binary data).

Jeff