This is intended to allow for considered public review of proposals which would associate a commonly-used label with a URL scheme, and to avoid collision and multiple implementations in the URL scheme namespace. However, this form of URL scheme name is often selected because the name is intended to be widely distributed, seen and used, possibly by naive users. In the development of new products, vendors often have the need to use URLs to identify and locate resources in a manner that is NOT seen by end users, is not widely distributed, or for some other reason does not justify the effort to register a scheme name from the IETF tree. One approach which has been used informally for some time is what we may call the vnd scheme name tree. This document shall formalize the use of the vnd scheme name syntax, defining the vnd scheme name tree as one parallel to the IETF tree, with unique requirements for registration and management.
All parts are case-insensitive.
If a scheme is to be widely shared, it should either be owned by one vendor and shared with others by some external agreement, or should be registered within the IETF tree. The sole purpose for the vnd tree is to support vendor-specific URL scheme namespaces. The scheme-ID must comply with RFC 2396 and RFC 2718. As advice rather than direction, the vendor is encouraged to select a scheme-ID that is short and descriptive of its purpose. 3.1 General Requirements These requirements are modeled upon those for MIME types, as set forth in RFC 2048.