human readability/usability in XRIs

["Lindelsee, Mike" <mlindels@visa.com>]

Hi All,

I've been thinking about what we mean by human readability/usability and it is clear that we have different opinions as to what it means.  For instance, to me it means XRIs that are composed of characters that CAN be read and understood by human beings (not that it is necessarily easy to do so).  For instance,

   xri://(http://root.cross-reference.com).leaf/local/part

(to steal an example from the strawman) is something that I consider both human readable and usable and

  urn:xri://.A4B7.14E8.CA62/.(urn:xri://.DA23.7F2B/.97).7.2

is not (less so in any case).

It was mentioned in the thread on versioning that using cross references as version tags might not be considered human readable.  I personally don't think that is the case.  I also find the global contexts defined in the strawman to make XRIs look more complicated (and to my way of thinking, less human readable).  Are there good examples that lead to needing to SYNTACTICALLY distinguish between XRIs that identify individuals, organizations and concepts?

Mike