Draft OpenID v.Next Discovery working group charter

[Drummond Reed]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:47 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> <snip>
>
> XRI is the only OASIS TC to have failed to gain approval for its
> specifications from the membership. It was rejected specifically
> because Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C TAG argued against it as an
> unnecessary fragmentation of the naming space.
>
> Describing it as 'moving forward' as if it was a train that could pull
> OpenID in its wake is optimistic in the extreme. A more realistic
> assessment is that XRI is essentially dead for all purposes and OpenID
> is the only remaining chance for resurrection.
>

<snip>

Phillip, while I respect your opinion, I just want to note for the record
that XRI is alive and well. Although the issue with the W3C about namespace
fragmentation was unfortunate, the issues the W3C had with XRI 2.0 were
resolved via a mutual dialog between the XRI TC and the W3C TAG within a few
months, and are now reflected in the XRI Syntax
3.0<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/35972/xri-syntax-3.0-wd03.pdf>spec.

One benefit of this is that XRI 3.0 identifiers are all relative URIs so
they can be turned into absolute URIs just by binding them to a base URI.
Thus in their http or https bound form they will all work as OpenID
identifiers without any special treatment (though that approach will not
take advantage of their automatic reassignable-to-persistent identifier
mapping which solves the OpenID recycling problem).

As XRI has matured, the key problem space it is now being directed at is
semantically meaningful identifiers (e.g., RDF statements encoded in
identifiers). That's what the OASIS XDI TC is all about. Its work is still
young but is already being applied to personal data
stores<http://www.equalsdrummond.name/?p=249>
.

Since all XRI and XDI resolution (at least as proposed so far) takes place
on top of DNS, XRI not a competitor to DNS, it's just a higher level of
abstraction, and like all layers of abstraction is only needed by
applications built for that layer.

Best,

=Drummond
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