RE: URNs, Namespaces and Registries

Hi Dave (& All),

I only mentioned the stuff about if http ever goes away because section
2.3 of the finding says, "...if for some reason in the future the HTTP
protocol becomes unavailable or inappropriate...". I didn't even want to
think about that! The finding raises the question about what would
happen if the HTTP PROTOCOL goes away, not necessarily the HTTP scheme.
My response was about the HTTP PROTOCOL going away, not the HTTP scheme.
There is no XRI protocol to go away -- it's protocol independent (sorta
- it uses http GETs for resolution, but that could change to some other
protocol without impacting the issued XRIs).

Although I've read the whole finding, I'm trying to ponder it a little
bit at a time, and I'm still way back in section 2. I haven't gotten to
the point I'm actually pondering the stuff in section 5 yet, so I
haven't yet cogitated the "http redirect versus the xri redirect" that
you addressed in section 5. I do suspect I'll find a difference though
-- with the http redirect, I'd first go to the old location to find a
pointer to the newer location. If the locations changes again, I think a
diligent administrator would then re-update the oldest location to point
to the newest location, then update the not quite so old location to
point to the newest location. If the location changes yet again, would
the diligent administrator need to update the 3 prior locations, and so
on? I think a difference is that with http, the app looks somewhere for
a resource, and then it's exception/error processes would probably be
invoked to follow the redirect(s). With XRI resolution the app first
pulls back the resource's current XRDS (XML descriptor of the named
resource's current service points), and then interacts directly with the
current service point. There's only one place (the XRDS) to do the
update when an actual location changes. Accessing the resource with XRI
is always (ignoring caching) a two-step process, while with http I think
it could be a one-to-many-step process. I'll try to be more intelligent
about this when I get to section 5.

Marty.Schleiff

Received on Monday, 14 August 2006 22:48:20 UTC