XRI Names and XRI Addresses

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

I had an action item to raise the issue in the v4 Requirements doc of
the introduction of the terms "XRI Name" and "XRI Address". In this
draft we only used these terms in the first half of the Motivations
section, but in the final draft (and most importantly, in the spec
itself), we should use them consistently throughout.
 
These terms were proposed by Dave Wentker as "human-friendly
identifiers" for what we have been referring to technically as XRI-URIs
and XRI-URNs. The reason is that with coming of a formal spec, we will
need to begin communicating with a much larger audience about the major
features of XRIs, and one of them is that XRIs provide a standard syntax
for both reassignable, human-friendly abstract identifiers and
persistent, machine-friendly abstract identifiers. So we need clear,
consistent, understandable terms for both layers.
 
Please post any thoughts you have about standardizing on these terms.
 
My one suggestion after chewing on this over the weekend is that we
might want to use the modifier "persistent" when talking about XRI
addresses because that is what so significantly distinguishes them from
IP addresses (or any form of name, whether a DNS name or an XRI name).
So from an Internet resolution standpoint the four possible layers would
be:
 
* XRI name
* XRI persistent address
* DNS name
* IP address
 
You can skip a layer any time a resource doesn't need the features of
that layer, i.e., an XRI name can refer directly to a URI or an IP
address if the resource does not need a persistent identifier, or an XRI
persistent address can refer directly to an IP address if it doesn't
need a DNS name.
 
=Drummond