URI vs. IRI for XMPP

(Cross-posted to uri@w3.org and xmppwg@jabber.org)

Several months ago, I requested that the IESG consider the XMPP URI
draft [1] for advancement to Proposed Standard. Feedback [2] received
from Leslie Daigle has led me to reconsider whether it is appropriate
for XMPP addresses (a.k.a. JIDs) to be represented as URIs. Instead, 
it seems preferable to represent XMPP addresses as Internationalized 
Resource Identifiers (IRIs; see RFC 3987 [3]). I think there would be
several benefits to this approach:

1. As Martin Duerst once commented [4], "an XMPP IRI can directly be 
   constructed by prepending 'xmpp:' to a jid" since JIDs are UTF-8 and
   we can use %HH to encode UTF-8 characters, so representing JIDs as
   IRIs feels more natural.

2. Representing XMPP addresses as IRIs enables us to re-use the rules 
   for transforming IRIs to URIs specified in RFC 3987, rather than
   trying to define our own, independent set of rules (which is bound 
   to conflict with the IRI rules at some point). Re-use is good.

Therefore, I have written a proposal for representing XMPP addresses as
IRIs [5] and would appreciate feedback on that approach before I submit
the proposal to the IETF Secretariat and retract the earlier URI draft.

Thanks.

Peter

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saintandre-xmpp-uri-08.txt
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_comment&id=32042
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/4t4u4
[3] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2004Aug/0043.html
[5] http://www.saint-andre.com/drafts/draft-saintandre-xmpp-iri-00.html

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2005 21:11:24 UTC