[OpenID] W3C TAG recommends against XRI

[Christopher St John]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Nat Sakimura <sakimura at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Drummond will post a note on this, which is more authoritative
> than mine, but I will post mine in the mean time.
>
> Their concerns, I think, are as follows:
>
> 1) xri: is not registered at IANA
> 2) xri resolution requires at least two round trip. One to get XRDS, and
>    another to get the real resource. This is a waste, and should be
> done in single trip.
> 3) We should reuse the existing scheme and http: should suffice instead of xri:
>

Actually, those weren't statements, but requests for
clarification (minus the "this is a waste" part, which
was not part of the w3c response). See [1].

The actual reasons are here[2], with sort of an overview
and the offical conclusion here[3].

To summarize (badly. go read the originals) you can pretty
clearly do it all with http, so there's no need for xri.

I'm not an unalloyed fan of the w3c process, but they do
have some pretty good technical people and the reasoning
expressed in the response appears to be sound.

-cks


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Feb/0009.html
see the paragraph starting "if you could clarify"

[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0076.html

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0095.html


-- 
Christopher St. John
http://artofsystems.blogspot.com