http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI Tim Berners-Lee article in 1998 was the true starting point.

Didn't delve into the others until sitting down to hard code out the process and found many of our ideas had been partially done before in other formats.  Honestly it was the only piece I had read in 2004 when the concept was orginally proposed for the Transparent Federal Budget Project.  Later iterations were greatly inspired by conversations with Tantek Celik about the http://microformats.org process in 2006. - Silona

Other stuff I read up on after I thought of the basic concept...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Uniform_Resource_Locator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifier

http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html - Silona

http://microformats.org/wiki/start-simple Tantek has added some more guidelines here on simplicity! - Silona

Document datestamp version naming precedents:

• W3C pubrules: http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules?uimode=filter&uri=#thisversionuri
  • specifically the use of "-YYYYMMDD" as a suffix to indicate a specifically datestamped version. E.g. "shortname-YYYYMMDD".
  • While this follows ISO8601, based on experiences with accessibility in microformats, I would now recommend splitting the year, month, day with dashes (also permitted in ISO8601) for better readability, e.g. -YYYY-MM-DD or using ordinal dates like -YYYY-DDD which use the same number of characters as YYYYMMDD but with the advantage of separating the year from the day of the year. Separating year from month/day also allows for publishers to use five digit years if they wish (as The Long Now Foundation does). - Tantek Çelik, 2009-197.