RE: [xri-editors] Relative cross-references

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@onename.com>]

There already is one substitute character for whitespace, which is
escaping it. But no one wants to type

	=John%20Doe

And yet the fundamental problem with the "forced concatenation" of DNS
and many other name services loses information.

	=JohnDoe

Of course hyphens are legal in both DNS and XRI syntax, so you can use
them as a fix.

	=John-Doe

But you really can't attach strong semantic meaning to that because some
names natively include hyphens.

	=Mary-Doe-Smith

Is that supposed to be "Mary-Doe Smith" or "Mary Doe-Smith"?

After two months of thinking about this (literally, ever since the use
cases for relative cross-references began to appear), I realized the
most elegant solution to this problem was indeed relative
cross-references, i.e., they are the clearest way to express the
aggregation of the identifiers "John" and "Doe", as well as the
aggregation of the identifiers "table", "of", and "contents", in the
natural language order in which the would appear.

	=(.John.Doe)
	+(table.of.contents)
	@(General.Motors)

All the information is there, and it's unambiguous. The only thing it's
not is super human-friendly. The final degree of subtlety (in the
grouping of identifiers using parens) is, well, subtle.

But that's a problem that I think real world implementations will solve
in several ways (most directly, by UIs accepting all the combinations
above and intelligently mapping them to the underlying XRI syntax).

My final conclusion was that we didn't need anything different in XRI
syntax than exactly what we have. All the necessary syntax to express
the relationships between identifiers (in any language) are already
there and as elegant as we can get them. As Einstein said, make it as
simple as possible but no simpler.

(If anyone can see a way to make this simpler still, please stand up and
shout ;-)

=Drummond 




-----Original Message-----
From: Lindelsee, Mike [mailto:mlindels@visa.com]
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:59 PM
To: 'Dave McAlpin'; Drummond Reed; Wachob, Gabe;
xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: Veizades, John; Marc LeMaitre; jerry.kindall@epok.net
Subject: RE: [xri-editors] Relative cross-references

I also find dots as a substitute for whitespace to be confusing.  I
think it is reasonable to have a substitute character for whitespace,
but it probably shouldn't be a character that we already use.  I think
overloading the semantics of the characters already used in XRIs will
introduce unnecessary complication.

Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave McAlpin [mailto:dave.mcalpin@epokinc.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:35 PM
> To: 'Drummond Reed'; 'Wachob, Gabe'; xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
> Cc: 'Veizades, John'; 'Marc LeMaitre'; jerry.kindall@epok.net
> Subject: RE: [xri-editors] Relative cross-references
>
>
> I see. So the parens in the example xri:+(.table.of.contents)
> are somewhat
> comparable to quotes, and have the standard cross-reference meaning of
> "understand this as a single element".
>
> I'm still a little uncomfortable with dots as a substitute
> for whitespace
> here, but for some reason I'm fine with that concept in the =
> namespace.
> =John.Doe seems perfectly reasonable, partly because we're
> used to seeing
> John.Doe in mailto URIs, but also because I expect the =
> namespace to be
> flat and consequently I'm not tempted to read the dot as a point of
> delegation. I don't think I have the same expectation of
> flatness in the +
> namespace, especially since we have the example of +flowers.rose.
>
> I'm still wondering if this is unnecessarily complicated for
> the examples
> section.
>
> Dave
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Drummond Reed [mailto:drummond.reed@onename.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 12:01 PM
> To: Dave McAlpin; Wachob, Gabe; xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
> Cc: Veizades, John; Marc LeMaitre; jerry.kindall@epok.net
> Subject: RE: [xri-editors] Relative cross-references
>
> Funny you should ask, Dave. I was just about to use a relative
> cross-reference to illustrate your answer to the last
> question. As I've
> studied the use of XRIs, esp. in the context for XDI, the issue of
> "substituting for white space" has increased in importance.
>
> For example, if you want to reference the concept widely known in
> English as "table of contents", you can't escape the reality
> that it is
> identified by 3 English words. No one knows it by the term
> "contents" or
> even "tablecontents". It is "table of contents".
>
> If you scrunch it down to "TableOfContents" or "tableofcontents", you
> lose information. You don't actually know the original three
> words. And,
> from a semantic mapping standpoint, you lose the absolutely critical
> information that "table of contents" is actually linked to
> the concepts
> of "table" and "contents".
>
> So what's the best way to properly express this as an XRI?
>
>       xri:+(.table.of.contents)
>
> In other words, a relative XRI used as a cross-reference
> because what it
> does is link three separate concepts (table, of, and
> contents) into one
> concept.
>
> I've got several other use cases as well (some of which I
> posted on the
> discussion thread when I raised the whole issue of relative
> cross-references) but I think this makes the point. I've got
> to take off
> for a meeting and will be offline for a few hours.
>
> =Drummond 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave McAlpin [mailto:dave.mcalpin@epokinc.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 11:32 AM
> To: 'Dave McAlpin'; Drummond Reed; 'Wachob, Gabe';
> xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
> Cc: 'Veizades, John'; Marc LeMaitre; jerry.kindall@epok.net
> Subject: [xri-editors] Relative cross-references
>
> I see we're now allowing relative cross-references. I
> remember we talked
> about this and I guess we decided to allow them, but I'm not at all
> clear
> what they mean. Does someone have an actual use case in mind?
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
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