RE: [XRI] TAG recommendation

> From: John Bradley
> [ . . . ]
> In the first case http://xri.net/=jbradley <http://xri.net/=jbradley>  is an abstract identifier
> that is resolved to a CID and XML meta data.
>
> In the second case http://xri.net/=jbradley <http://xri.net/=jbradley>  is treated as a browsers
> request for a concrete URI resource.
>
> So yes the result depends on the context in which the
> resolution occurs.
>  [ . . . ]
> If David or others can come up with a way to disambiguate the
> overloading caused by scheme reuse,  I am happy to work with them to
> incorporate it,  in the revised specs.

The easy solution is to have an intervening 303-redirect.  So for example, if you set up xri.net as an XRI proxy, then when http://xri.net/xri/=jbradley  is dereferenced in a browser, xri.net should return a 303-redirect to a different URI such as http://xri.net/content/=jbradley which would give a 200 response with the desired XRI content or metadata or whatever it is that you wish to return.  However, an XRI-aware application would recognize the "http://xri.net/xri/<http://xri.net/xri/=jbradley>" prefix and do its own XRI resolution.


Or, following your idea for exploiting DNS, a browser dereferencing http://boeing.com.xri.net/xri/=jbradley would get back a 303 redirect from the Boeing XRI proxy to a content URI http://boeing.com.xri.net/content/=jbradley , which would give a 200 response with the desired XRI content.  But an XRI-aware application would recognize the "http://boeing.com.xri.net/xri/<http://boeing.com.xri.net/xri/=jbradley>" prefix and do its own XRI resolution, perhaps interacting with a Boeing XRI server.


This is the same convention that is used for semantic web URIs, to avoid creating an ambiguity between a web page (or "information resource") and real-world objects:

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software <http://www.hp.com/go/software>

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