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

On 2012-06-23 13:36, Michiel de Jong wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That's a good point, and that's also what was the other option: not
> registering a URI scheme (effectively using the actual webfinger
> lookup URL as a URI), and then just using "bare user addresses" in the
> ?id= parameter. in fact, the proposal is not "/.wellknown?id=" but
> "/.well-known/host-meta[.json]?resource=", but the idea is the same,
> of course. also note you used 'google.com' but you probably meant
> 'gmail.com', because there is no way the client can know gmail.com is
> owned by google. And we use https. So the choice was between:
>
>      https://gmail.com/.well-known/host-meta?resource=joe@gmail.com
>
> or:
>
>      https://gmail.com/.well-known/host-meta?resource=acct:joe@gmail.com
>
> as the URL to retrieve information about joe@gmail.com, and by that
> merit, also as a URI to refer to this information itself. At the same
> time, host-meta says it will respond with information about "any URI'
> you put into its resource parameter. Why did we choose the second one?
> Because at the same time of defining these URLs, we are saying that
> the "?resource=" parameter, so either "joe@gmail.com" or
> "acct:joe@gmail.com", is in itself a URI.
>
> Even though "joe@gmail.com" is understood as "a Uniform Identifier for
> a Resource", it's not a URI. All existing URIs start with a scheme,
> and saying "joe@gmail.com" (however much we would like to) is a URI
> would be breaking a pattern. Randomly adding "xmpp:" in front would be
> really random and imprecise (same for "sip:" and "mailto:"). That's
> why adding the 'acct:' at the front made sense.
> ...

For the record: it's a URI reference (as per 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc3986.html#uri-reference>), so you 
*could* make the parameter a URI reference.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Saturday, 23 June 2012 11:52:02 UTC