Moving from "xri://" to "xri:"

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@cordance.net>]

XRI TC Members and Observers:

 

In discussion among the XRI Syntax 2.1 editors late last week, the question arose as to whether we needed to keep the “//” after “xri:” so that an XRI would be considered to have an RFC 3986/3987-compliant authority component. That was the motivation that “//” was added in XRI 2.0 syntax -- XRI 1.0 syntax used only “xri:” followed by the XRI authority component.

 

We realized that many of the reasons we desired compatability with RFC 3986/3987-compliant authority syntax, such as the ability to process IP addresses or DNS names in their URI/IRI syntax form, have changed in XRI 2.1. For example, the XRI $ Dictionary entries $ip and $dns will now be used to express IP addresses and DNS names. Also, XRI-normal form will now explicitly not use the scheme name, which is only added in IRI-normal form (see http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriCd02/FormsAndTransformations).

 

We also realized that having the XRI scheme use the URI/IRI “path-rootless” rule instead of the previous “authority path-abemtpy” rule would still give us URI-reference normalization, comparison rules, etc. But we would gain the following advantages:

 

1) An XRI “authority” will not be mistaken by a URI/IRI parser for a URI/IRI “host” (which it sometimes matched and sometimes did not).

 

2) Since "@" is explicitly allowed as a character in a URI/IRI path, we don't have to worry about escaping it when it is not the first character in the authority (as we would otherwise have had to do to conform with the URI/IRI “host” subrule of the “authority” rule).

 

3) We no longer need to specify/support the URI/IRI “port” rule, which has never really applied to XRI.

 

4) We can refer to the first segment in an absolute XRI as the "authority segment" because it is technically part of the path.

 

5) It makes it even clearer that XRI is designed to support multiple types of roots, including p2p roots, and XRI roots are rooted on GCS chars instead of "//".

 

We have thus updated the proposed XRI 2.1 ABNF listed at:

 

      http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriCd02/XriAbnf2dot1

 

Note that all proposed revisions are logged on this page so you can see the entire progression of the editor’s thinking from the start of the ABNF revision process. Please send any questions or feedback regarding this proposed change – or any other change – to the list, as we would like to produce Working Draft 01 of XRI Syntax 2.1 prior to our f2f meeting week after next.

 

Thank you,

 

=Drummond