A posting from Norman Walsh contains the text of an IETF Network Working Group Internet-Draft which the authors believe "resolves all outstanding issues with respect to the request for a 'publicid' NID." The draft A URN Namespace for Public Identifiers ('draft-urn-publicid-03, May 4, 2001) is authored by Norman Walsh (Sun Microsystems, Inc.), John Cowan (Reuters Health Information), and Paul Grosso (Arbortext, Inc.). The draft "describes a URN namespace that is designed to allow Public Identifiers to be expressed in URI syntax." From the document Introduction: "XML external entities have two identifiers: a system identifier and a public identifier. The system identifier is a URI, by definition, but the public identifier is simply a string. Historically, the system identifier of an external entity has been a local, or system-specific identifier while the public identifier has been a more global, persistent name. Unfortunately, public identifiers do not fit neatly into the existing web architecture because they are not legal URIs. Many new specifications (XSLT, XML Schema, etc.) have the implicit or explicit requirement that all external identifiers be URIs. The purpose of this namespace is to allow public identifiers to be encoded in URNs in a reliable, comparable way. This document describes a scheme for representing public identifiers as URNs by introducing a public identifier namespace, 'publicid'. This namespace specification is for a formal namespace."