

[XRI] http: sub-schemes the booth-bradley proposal

From: John Bradley <john.bradley@wingaa.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:39:58 -0700
Message-Id: <387B9F0F-C322-43FD-B4AA-FCF62C1D91E6@wingaa.com>
To: www-tag@w3.org

I want to explain part of my thinking on what has become known as the  
booth-bradley proposal.

This will at least give people something a bit more concrete to shoot  

If we want to create this thing called a http sub-scheme, we want to  
do it as far up the authority chain as possible but still within the  
http: scheme.

This leads us to examining the utility of using the TLD for this  
special purpose.

Consider what we might do if xri. were registered as a special TLD  
indicating a sub-scheme.

Syntacticly a sub-scheme is really just an additional set of  
constraints placed on a http: scheme URI.
There may be an intersection of this with URI tempting as I think it  
was David Orchard pointed out.

The sub-scheme flagged by the TLD would allow for special URI  
normalization rules and local processing on the client while being  
consistent with the TAGs Meta Data In URI finding http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html 

I think this syntax idea is relatively strait forward as these thing  
so.  The devil will be in the details.

What David and I discussed a bit offline and my be less obvious are  
the issues around resolution.

I do not imagine this TLD being administered as a regular TLD where  
people go and purchase a sub domain like boeing.xri. etc.

I see the TLD acting as a discovery service for http proxies that  
understand the protocol in question HXRI for XRI,  Jabber for XMPP etc.

I see the DNS people squirming now:)  I admit this is a bit on the  
edge,  however the root registry people I have talked to tell me it is  

I would propose that the DNS server answering queries for xri. be a  
That it uses XRDS-Simple to find the proxy service endpoint for the  
protocol in question, and return that IP address in its DNS response.

An example if I do a dns query for boeing.com.xri. the DNS proxy will  
do a XRDS-Simple query to boeing.com and extract from the HXRI proxy  
SEP the IP address element and return that via DNS.

Any http: sub-scheme can use this to discover proxy servers for there  

Yes you can use SRV records or some other thing as the proxy mechanism.

I think XRDS-Simple otherwise known as "XRI 2.0 resolution Section 6"  
is a good generic way to discover a proxy's address.
It includes provisions for load balancing etc.
For those of you unfamiliar with the spec it is a https: GET with an  
accept header requesting a mime type of application/xrds+xml and  
returning a XRDS document.

This is my fist crack at a proposal for managing the TLD.
I am philosophically opposed to forcing a manual registration process  
on people, for the http proxy.

Don't shoot at David,  the DNS to XRDS-Simple proxy idea is mine.

Counter proposals welcome.

John Bradley

Received on Monday, 28 July 2008 19:40:44 GMT
