Re: Fallback flow for /site-meta for top level domains

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> /site-meta on http://foobar.com/ doesn't (and can't, on its own) make any
> authoritative assertions about mailto:dirk@foobar.com; even though the
> authority is the same, the URI scheme is different.

That seems like a very strong assertion to make. There's no obvious
reason why this is so. DNS, for example, makes many authoritative
assertions about all sorts of things without being the same protocol.

> I know this particular issue is an important one to the OpenID folks, but
> there needs to be a very careful and broad discussion of allowing policy and
> metadata from HTTP to be considered *automatically* authoritative for other
> protocols.

I hadn't thought about it in these terms before, so thanks for the
nudge. Whoever controls DNS for a domain also controls how all schemes
are handled, in practice. Therefore, it seems to me, it should be
possible to declare via DNS that HTTP is authoritative (or not) for a
particular scheme. If DNS makes no statement, then I would argue that
it is reasonable to use defaults instead, such as falling back to
www.foobar.com if foobar.com doesn't work.

Cheers,

Ben.