- From: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com>
- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:05:54 +0000
- To: "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@cordance.net>, 'John Bradley' <john.bradley@wingaa.com>
- CC: 'Mark Baker' <distobj@acm.org>, "'Henry S. Thompson'" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
> From: Drummond Reed [mailto:drummond.reed@cordance.net] > [ . . . ] > I can understand the source of the confusion, however, > because XRDS documents are a defined media type retreived > from an http: or https: URI, so by AWWW guidelines they are > first-class resources on the Web. I don't believe that is a > problem, however; indeed, one might say that the whole > premise of abstract identifier architecture is that an > abstract identifier can be resolved to a resource that > describes another resource, and this set of relationships is > known a priori from the abstract identifier architecture. > This, in a nutshell, is why it is essential to know, a > priori, that an identifier is abstract, just as any > application can know, a priori, that a URN is abstract just > by looking at the urn: scheme prefix. If by "abstract" you mean that the identifier names something other than the metadata that you get when you dereference the identifier, then this can be done with an intervening 303 redirect as described in http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris and the Booth-Bradley proposal for using a specialized http URI prefix would be sufficient to allow users to determine by inspecting the URI (without dereferencing it) that the URI is "abstract". This is exactly the optimization that is recommended for use of thing-described-by.org: http://thing-described-by.org/#optimizing For example, if http://boeing.com.xri.net/=jbradley is intended to denote John Bradley the person, then the boeing.com.xri.net server can be configured to make an HTTP GET request for that URI return a 303 redirect to some other URI, which in turn will return the metadata about John Bradley. Furthermore, if this convention is adopted, an XRI-aware agent, by inspecting the URI, could see that it matches the pattern http://*.xri.net/* and be able to know that the identifier is "abstract". David Booth, Ph.D. HP Software +1 617 629 8881 office | dbooth@hp.com http://www.hp.com/go/software Statements made herein represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of HP unless explicitly so stated.
Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 12:07:24 UTC