First, just to address some clarification
questions in this thread, the proposal under discussion, called GCS Delimiter,
is posted at:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriThree/GcsDelimiter
The accompanying ABNF that implements this
proposal is at:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriThree/SyntaxAbnf
As described there in more detail, the
proposal is that in XRI 3.0, all GCS characters (=, @, +, $) are treated in XRI
syntax as delimiters just like * and ! are in XRI 2.0.
Per the ABNF, both =
and @microsoft.com=drummond would parse into two subsegments. =
would parse into:
1) =drummond
2) @microsoft.com
@microsoft.com=drummond would parse into:
1) @microsoft.com
2) =drummond
=drummond+phone+home would parse into:
1) =drummond
2) +phone
3) +home
In XRI resolution, each of these would
produce its own XRD. I don’t know why John thinks this is strange –
an XRD can describe any resource, and certainly my phone collection is a
resource, and my home phone is a resource.
=Drummond
From: John Bradley
[mailto:]
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008
10:47 AM
To: Victor Grey
Cc: Chasen, Les; Drummond Reed;
OASIS XRI TC; David Orchard
Subject: Re: [xri] GCS Characters
Well thats a can of worms:)
I think in Drummonds proposal + and $ also get to have XRD.
In the first segment the only place those
symbols formerly known as GCS would have
there conventional meaning is if they are attached to the
first sub segment.
If they are the leading character of any other subsegment they would be
treated as * and the =, +, $ are only inferences to the global
concept.
Remember I am the one opposed to the change unless there is a good
reason. So take any pro things I say with a grain of salt.
The thing is that under that they will be treated as sub segments by
the authority server, so what gets passed?
For =
the first subsegment is =drummond what is the second that get passed to
=drummonds's authority service?
*@microsoft.com
@microsoft.com
*(@microsoft.com)
microsoft.com
So would =drummond*microsoft.com produce the same XRD as =?
Could go ether way depending on how we define resolution.
Yes having =drummond+phone have its own XRD seems sort of funky to me
as well.
John B.
On 24-Nov-08, at 10:23 AM, Victor Grey wrote:
The confusion with email
addresses, social, technical or otherwise, is not the only problematic aspect
of the @ GCS character.
XMPP addresses take the form of username@host/optional/path. The username part
(known as a JID or Jabber Identifier) has only a very few disallowed
characters, including whitespace and control chars and : / " ' and of
course @.
The = and @ GCS characters both denote a reassignable identifier for an entity,
as opposed to + and $ which identify terms.
@ and = also serve as configurable aliases for an XRD discovery function $f(x),
for example $dns(xri.net).
If we didn't have to deal with @, we could define a very simple and expandable
set of transformations for XRD discovery:
Given an abstract ID =drummond with $f(x) configured as $dns(xri.net), here are
some possible discovery transformations:
https https://xri.net/=drummond
http http://xri.net/=drummond
xmpp =
mailto = (I think there is an
attractive case for an XRI aware mailserver that can resolve the XRI and make
service selections based on the XRD and x-headers.)
Other as yet to be invented communication protocols could all be accommodated
with this simple and very abstract spec. We shouldn't let the current
kerfluffle with the W3C derail us into thinking that http is the whole universe
of possibility.
Since @ and = behave exactly the same way, and =ids --can-- be used as
community roots already, I've never really understood any strong necessity for
the overloading of the entity identifier to distinguish individuals from
collections of individuals, and the disregard of the fact that there could be
other kinds of entities besides those two.
So at the risk of making everyone's head explode, I'm proposing that we
deprecate the @ GCS character in XRI 3, and make = the single GCS character
that denotes a reassignable identifier for any kind of entity. An entity would
be defined as anything that can have an XRD.
=vg
