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Subject: On parentheses and changes
I don’t have much time here, but I wanted to make a
quick note about parentheses and cross references. First, I’m not able to keep up with all the
discussions – so Drummond, while I sounded like I agreed with the
proposal you were making a week or two ago, I think things have moved so fast
that I don’t feel like I even understand what it is I agreed to at this
point. Second, I’m very concerned that we’re treading
into areas (changing xref syntax) that we might find ourselves deciding later
on we could have gone either way on. Yes, right now, the particular concerns
about human-friendliness have taken over the conversation, but we also have
machine friendliness to consider. Steve’s advocacy of the computer’s
interest (hah!) in the form of “abstract” syntax is addressing this
area – though I have to admit I haven’t been able to follow in
great detail. Personally, I never thought humans would be constructing cross
references, so I’m finding these “easier for humans”
arguments a little unpersuasive this late in the game. Thirdly, we have to be careful about changing things that
people are already using. I’m worried on a couple of angles. First, we
have deployed code out there, and while nobody has spoken up about using the
current syntax, I’m worried there are people out there who may be, and
aren’t aware of the scope of the changes being proposed. Second, there’s
an XRI that’s pretty widely deployed *right now* that contains an xref
that I believe would become an “oddity” by the new syntax
architecture – namely “xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)” Every OpenID
identifier has an XRDS document using this XRI as a namespace identifier. Third,
we are already seeing folks prepare derivative documents based on our documents
because the folks believe our documents are too complicated – that’s
fine, but if we start going changing our stuff, I worry that a) we’ll
lose control of the XRI specs and b) we’ll lose credibility altogether
for XRI if we change stuff after stuff has been deployed out in the wild. My last point needs to be re-emphasized. I think we’re
reaching a point where enough people are relying on our stuff that we can no
longer change it willy-nilly and be able to rely assertions from TC members
that nobody is using a particular feature or construct. We claim that nothing
we’re doing is “backwards incompatible” but the more basic
stuff we muck with, the less I’m confident that we really understand how
our changes might ripple through implementations and adoption assumptions made
based on reasonable reading of earlier drafts. -Gabe |
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