Re: [xri] Potential breakthrough

["Tan, William" <William.Tan@neustar.biz>]

Drummond Reed wrote:
>
> I have an internal maxim that I follow: if Steve tells me he’s got a 
> problem with something, and after three times trying to work it out 
> with him, he’s still got a problem with it, then I need to look at it 
> very closely and see if there’s a better solution.
>
> I’ve worked long enough with Marty now to realize the same thing is 
> true with him.
>
> So when both of them plus Wil are telling me something is too complex, 
> that’s one helluva strong signal.
>
Not to mention Gabe too.

> So after yesterday’s thread, I looked closely at the requirements 
> again and thought about the key issue Steve has raised about how 
> “sticky stars” makes for funky synonym rules. This jibes with what 
> Marty keeps saying about how the original “compact syntax” was much 
> simpler than “sticky stars”.
>
> I have always been the one saying that we needed sticky stars. So I 
> revisited that assumption…and realized that in that area I too had 
> been stuck with a “2.0” filter on. I had been assuming that anything 
> you could express as a parenthetical xref (which is “opaque” to XRI 
> resolution) had to be something that was also equally “opaque” when 
> expressed as a global-xref.
>
> But it’s that assumption that leads both to most of the increased 
> complexity and the funky synonym problem. So if you drop that 
> assumption and do as Marty has been suggesting all along and simply 
> treat all subsegments as subsegments…
>
> …everything works just fine.
>
[snip]
>
> So I tried to figure out if there was any other requirement – in XDI 
> RDF or anywhere else global-xrefs would be used – that would not be 
> met if global-xrefs were not opaque. I couldn’t come up with any.
>

I think you said that if we couldn't have sticky stars it would hugely 
diminish the benefits of concatenated syntax. I don't recall drilling 
into the reasoning behind that.

I agree that not having the sticky star rules does simplify things a 
lot. In effect, we're kind of back to compact syntax, which means that a 
global-xref is a two-subseg-XRI-where-first-subseg-is-GCS construct. In 
this case, it really becomes more like a shorthand i.e. compact syntax. 
I wonder if this approach was taken if we should revisit normalization? 
Certainly, the rules of when to normalize to a parenthesized form are 
going to be simpler as well. I still feel that the parentheses makes it 
clear that the referenced identifier is local, especially Steve and 
Marty's point that =steve@microsoft.com gives a false sense impression 
that the real authority is @microsoft.com to people who are used to 
email identifiers.


=wil