| I think many things are strange.
You really do ned to buy into the concept that + when used someplace other than at the start of the first subsegment is purely a subsegment delimiter and has no semantic meaning to XRI resolution.
Yes something, a person or process may draw an inference from the fact it is +phone vs *phone but not the resolver.
In XRI 2.0 a XRI that starts with a * or ! is relative and one that starts with @ or = is absolute.
How do I state a relative XRI for @microsoft.com and not have it interpreted as absolute? *(@microsoft.com)
John B.
On 24-Nov-08, at 11:07 AM, Drummond Reed wrote: First, just to address some clarification questions in this thread, the proposal under discussion, called GCS Delimiter, is posted at: The accompanying ABNF that implements this proposal is at: As described there in more detail, the proposal is that in XRI 3.0, all GCS characters (=, @, +, $) are treated in XRI syntax as delimiters just like * and ! are in XRI 2.0. 1) =drummond 2) @microsoft.com @microsoft.com=drummond would parse into: 1) @microsoft.com 2) =drummond =drummond+phone+home would parse into: 1) =drummond 2) +phone 3) +home In XRI resolution, each of these would produce its own XRD. I don’t know why John thinks this is strange – an XRD can describe any resource, and certainly my phone collection is a resource, and my home phone is a resource. =Drummond
From: John Bradley [mailto:jbradley@mac.com]
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 10:47 AM
To: Victor Grey
Cc: Chasen, Les; Drummond Reed; OASIS XRI TC; David Orchard
Subject: Re: [xri] GCS Characters Well thats a can of worms:) I think in Drummonds proposal + and $ also get to have XRD. In the first segment the only place those symbols formerly known as GCS would have there conventional meaning is if they are attached to the first sub segment. If they are the leading character of any other subsegment they would be treated as * and the =, +, $ are only inferences to the global concept. Remember I am the one opposed to the change unless there is a good reason. So take any pro things I say with a grain of salt. The thing is that under that they will be treated as sub segments by the authority server, so what gets passed? For =drummond@microsoft.com the first subsegment is =drummond what is the second that get passed to =drummonds's authority service? Could go ether way depending on how we define resolution. Yes having =drummond+phone have its own XRD seems sort of funky to me as well. On 24-Nov-08, at 10:23 AM, Victor Grey wrote:
The confusion with email addresses, social, technical or otherwise, is not the only problematic aspect of the @ GCS character.
XMPP addresses take the form of username@host/optional/path. The username part (known as a JID or Jabber Identifier) has only a very few disallowed characters, including whitespace and control chars and : / " ' and of course @.
The = and @ GCS characters both denote a reassignable identifier for an entity, as opposed to + and $ which identify terms.
@ and = also serve as configurable aliases for an XRD discovery function $f(x), for example $dns(xri.net).
If we didn't have to deal with @, we could define a very simple and expandable set of transformations for XRD discovery:
Given an abstract ID =drummond with $f(x) configured as $dns(xri.net), here are some possible discovery transformations:
https https://xri.net/=drummond
http http://xri.net/=drummond
xmpp =drummond@xri.net
mailto =drummond@xri.net (I think there is an attractive case for an XRI aware mailserver that can resolve the XRI and make service selections based on the XRD and x-headers.)
Other as yet to be invented communication protocols could all be accommodated with this simple and very abstract spec. We shouldn't let the current kerfluffle with the W3C derail us into thinking that http is the whole universe of possibility.
Since @ and = behave exactly the same way, and =ids --can-- be used as community roots already, I've never really understood any strong necessity for the overloading of the entity identifier to distinguish individuals from collections of individuals, and the disregard of the fact that there could be other kinds of entities besides those two.
So at the risk of making everyone's head explode, I'm proposing that we deprecate the @ GCS character in XRI 3, and make = the single GCS character that denotes a reassignable identifier for any kind of entity. An entity would be defined as anything that can have an XRD.
=vg
|