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Subject: Formal proposal on non-resolvable XRIs


Having noodled over last week's discussions, here's a formal proposal to
close the non-resolvability issues in the 07 draft.

The proposal is that we drop the the use of the "!" character as the
indicator for non-resolvability, and also drop this as an XRI reserved
character. (This brings the delta between the URI reserved character set
and the XRI reserved character set down to four chars - left paren,
right paren, dot, and star.) This also eliminates the issues around the
"!" character not falling cleanly into the 2396 URI component buckets.

In place of "!", we define "$/" as the special metadata that identicates
"the following XRI value is non-resolvable in the context of this XRI".

Like any XRI identifier space, if the XRI value following "$/" is global
(rather than local), it must be enclosed as an xref.

Lastly, we specify that the $/ is ignored for purposes of establishing
equivalence between two XRI values.

Examples: 

	xri:$/(@foo.bar/baz)		(is equivalent to
"xri:@foo.bar/baz")
	xri:$/(//www.example.com/:1234:56/:78)
	xri:$/(urn:isbn:some-isbn-number)
	xri:@foo.bar/($/(//www.example.com/:1234:56/:78))

Note that the last example is (IMO) redundant and not recommended
because nested xrefs should always be treated as opaque in the context
of the enclosing XRI. Although they may be resolvable *on their own*, in
the context of the enclosing XRI they are only used to establish a
shared identifier.

"$/" is proposed because a) it's short, and b) it seems like a logical
meaning for the standalone meaning of this character, because the $
space is intended for identifier metadata that will, as a rule, not be
resolvable, but can only be interpreted in the context of the XRI
specification.

Please post any problems/counter-proposals by Thursday or we'll go with
this in the 07 draft.

=Drummond 


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