Back to XRI

Mark asked me to start a new thread re-summarizing the XRI
requirements. Given the history of the issue I think that the XRI
folks deserve some focused discussion on their specifics. Here is a
summary of my understanding:

XRI is a way of representing identifiers that are designed to be
resolved with a protocol that is more distributed and reliable than
the standard HTTP resolution mechanism.

In order to invoke that extra resolution machinery, it must be
possible for client apps to recognize these identifiers when they are
used as URIs. This recognition must necessarily happen before
resolution, not after.

XRIs will be used (as http or FTP URIs are used) in contexts where
there is no hypermedia to be the engine of state, or where the goal is
to bootstrap the hypermedia-based communication.

It would be incredibly valuable for XRIs to be backwards compatible
with HTTP clients through the use of HTTP URIs.

Therefore the current proposal as I understand it is to treat HTTP
URIs in subdomains of XRI.net as XRIs.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Saturday, 26 July 2008 16:14:00 UTC