Re: Registration of acct: as a URI scheme has been requested

On 22 June 2012 23:01, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

>
> On 22 Jun 2012, at 22:35, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>
> > On 6/22/12 1:02 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
> >> It seems like it would be better to use just mailto: (i.e., the
> original WebFinger design was around *email addresses*, not accounts per
> se) or a http: URI rather than mint a whole new scheme.
> > Here's why mailto: won't work. Most user agents will invoke an email
> client app. Remember, this is about using the URI as a name rather than
> data locator or access mechanism. That's the reason my acct: is required.
> Basically, follow-your-nose linked data traversal (with alternative URI
> resolvers hooked in via host-metadata pattern usage) without unintended
> consequences i.e., de-reference the next chunk of data etc...
> >
>
> Yes, though one wonders why they don't just put a URL in there: it could be
>
>   http://google.com/.wellknown?id=joe@gmail.com
>
> or whatever. All the accnt: url is is a short cut for something like the
> above, because inevitably the account URI has to be resolved in some way
> such as that. The confusion comes from not being able to distinguish
> between human readable names and uris.
>
> <a href="http://google.com/.wellknown?id=joe@gmail.com">Joe@gmail.com</a>
> is the way we usually differentiate between human readable names and URLs.
>  The machine readable url is hidden from view of the user, and the human
> readable one is a string that the user can read.
>
> I don't think that user will find the "accnt:" string in front of their
> e-mail in any way intuitive. And if they were asked to distinguish between
> that and an e-mail url it would get even more confusing.
>
> Furthermore the accnt uri then imposes a set of conventions such as
> .well-known on the web where web architecture tries to avoid such
> conventions as much as possible - essentially because there is no way to
> impose such conventions on the whole web.
>

+1

And where does it end?  By exactly the same logic, should we also make a
user: URI to represent a user ... if not, why not?  etc. etc.


>
>
> Henry
>
> >
> > --
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Kingsley Idehen
> > Founder & CEO
> > OpenLink Software
> > Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> > Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> > Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
> > Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
> > LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>
>