Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular?

I’m working on i18n of an API for a customer now. It’s a domain where one needs to refer to phone numbers, bank accounts, National Identity Numbers, business / legal entity organization numbers etc; in short, IDs in misc. national and international registries. URN should be perfect for this; I would expect to do the i18n by replacing a Norwegian account number “12345678902” with “urn:bban:NO:12345678902”, or a Danish company number “987322431” with “urn:business:DK:CRV:987322431”. However, the list of URN namespaces is very lacking. I’d expect to at least see “urn:msisdn:“; or “urn:nin:DK:…” for Danish national identity numbers. But it’s not there. What I see looking around is a lot of home made solutions that make inferences about ID spaces based on “country” that usually holds but not always; or solutions coming from the XML world that seem very complicated to figure out (like ISO 6523 which declares ‘0037’ for the Finnish company registry, and the syntax around it is XML or home-grown). URN would have been such a simple and nice solution. Why has it not catched on?
Story Published at: January 6, 2023 at 03:44PM