[OpenID] Comment on new Draft host-meta

[Peter Williams]

There is an unnamed planet with moons named phobos and deimos.

It’s the planet we can refer to as that thing with moons named phobos and deimos.

P and d apparently match some scope patterns, using an IETF-defined pattern matching algebra. The author got overly excited when describing his rule expressions - making it abstruse.

A link element in said anonymously-named planet (now think anonymous-named XRD file) binds copyright metadata (at some other url) to p and d both

Another link-template tells you who to query, to get the XRD of p and then d. The template is a simple url-factory.

At no time did we bother to refer to unnamed planet/xrd as ares, mars or nergal (or whatever else the Mayans, say, called it).

If we wanted to talk about mars (and its XRD) in some formal way (in the UN Planetary Authorities formal book of planets), that naming authority might name it and declare it an official planet (and there would duly be a diplomatic tussle between the French and the English whether fr:mars comes before or after en:mars). 

At some point, e.g. Pluto, the name registration might disappear, since not all planets stay planets, and the named planet/xrd pluto might therefore lose its spot in the official registry of planet names. If one uses XRDs as the pages of the official book of planets (English registry), then use xrd.subject = "Mars". To satisfy the ancient Babylonians, also disclose in the XRI is official alias="Nerval". If you know what the Mayans named it, also include alias=<somethingMayan>. In the Greek version of the registry, it would probably be subject=Ἀρης (Ares), and alias=Mars alias=nerval.
 
There are lots of reasons to identify an object using an inverse functional relationship (i.e. scopes) - that avoids a direct naming (or direct aliasing). For one: it avoids declaring a "formal authority" and "formal names" (over which folks typically get all political). So, one MAY avoid all that (where appropriate). 


The subject's presence or absence is nothing more than that for me (not that I know what I'm talking about). 












-----Original Message-----
From: SitG Admin [mailto:sysadmin at shadowsinthegarden.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2009 8:36 PM
To: Peter Williams
Cc: openid-general at lists.openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID] Comment on new Draft host-meta

>The example however speaks for itself and (formal writing issues aside)
>seems obvious and useful.

Now . . . silly question, here, but it's been bugging me for a while, so:

Why can't the XRD file simply *contain*, in some (optional) 
element(s), the very information that would normally be documented in 
whatever page it was pointing at with the Subject field? In other 
words, if it is (implicitly) its *own* Subject, what (other than more 
bandwidth usage) can result in embedding the rules it will abide by?

I'm overstepping my understanding of XR* here, though, and 
speculating on what Subject is there for.

-Shade