Re: XRI, URI

2008/6/15 Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>:
>
> On Jun 14, 2008, at 6:18 PM, Earle Martin wrote:
> > To me, XRIs appear to be the reinvention, at least from the viewpoint of an
> > end user with fairly simplistic requirements.
>
> To be honest, many of the identifier schemes, uuids, oids, and other urn
> schemes seem for the most part, to me, someone with needs that range from
> the simple to the sophisticated, not to offer anything over HTTP. Issues
> around stability are more of a social and institutional issue than a
> technical one.  At worst, these alternatives may give users a false sense of
> security by implying that they are somehow superior to HTTP URIs, and
> therefore lull them in to thinking that they somehow need to do less work to
> ensure that adequate documentation remains available over the time one
> expects them to be stable over.

It always amazes me that people have an expectation that URI's will be
consistently resolvable, and if they are not then they are not valid.
It is a great ambition to always keep knowledge available for a
hundred or a thousand years but practically it doesn't happen. The
Internet isn't a big library that is being built up without
demolishing bits in the process, and XRI's won't provide for that any
more than any other mechanism. If anything because they require a
proprietary registration process with inevitable renewal fees, they
will go down as soon as people stop paying for them, like any HTTP
domain name will. I looked into the process of getting an iname but
quit as soon as I realised that my HTTP(S) OpenID was already more
powerful than it. If you want an iname it seems easier (and more
reliable) to register a .name address, or for a business a .biz/.com
address.

Has anyone figured out why OpenID requires XRI's internally
(apparently) but still uses a URI format and still has HTTP
identifiers for endusers? Also, how do they plan to stop spam while
still allowing email to proceed as it always has? Even queries inside
of identifiers are able to be done with HTTP URL's, and in a more
reliable way as far as I can tell.

What benefit do they actually give after all those questions are answered?

Is OASIS short on cash and needs to start up a DNS-like rival system
to make money? (tongue-in-cheek)

Cheers,

Peter

Received on Sunday, 15 June 2008 02:29:32 UTC