This whole mailto business...

[Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran@hueniverse.com>]

Dave Cridland brought up a good point on the APP list which is that mailto URIs don't have an authority section. For some reason, I was sure that the entire email address is the authority and is parsed based on RFC 3986 section 3.2. But this is incorrect. mailto URIs don't have an authority since they do not begin with mailto://.

This means that in order to support mailto URIs, HRDD must explicitly deal with mailto URIs and provide rules as to how to extract their authority. This is doable but no longer the clean and generic proposal it was meant to be.

This is all getting very complicated which leads me to make the following suggestion. At this point we have two (theorized) use cases:

1. Use emails to register to a site, allowing the site to perform discovery and find out where the user's address book it.
2. Use email identifiers as an OpenID identifier.

Both can come up with their own way to go from the email address to an XRD document very easily, even using the methods defined by HRDD. So there is no *requirement* for us to address this (this was covered on the call last week) as XRI doesn't define mailto binding.

I'm inclined to remove references to mailto URIs from the HRDD specification, mostly because I am not inclined to directly address authority extraction from a mailto URI path. This doesn't solve the scope question of Site-Meta but it moves the problem from HRDD to a potential OpenID discovery spec.

What do you think?

EHL