Shibboleth Developers

[Michael Schwartz <>]

Scott,

We were actually talking about "persistent identifiers." If you don't like 
i-names, and you don't have to use them, that's ok. That doesn't negate 
the value of globally registered inumbers. You could use IP addresses 
instead of dns names if you like. Same idea.

> You can do all that with URIs, because you don't have to store the 
> registry itself in DNS. It's parently obvious that you can do this 
> because XRIs can be expressed as URIs.

Compatability between XRI and URI was seen as a requirement. XDI leverages 
HTTP and JSON. XRI and URI are complementary.

> I also don't see how it fixes the problems of referencing people, 
> because people will not accept identification using them. They didn't 
> accept URIs as personal identifiers and they won't accept XRIs any 
> better. For better or worse, email addresses are the only game in town 
> right now. And the fact that Google and the other large properties have 
> cornered the market on how users self-identify with email is a serious 
> problem for federation and discovery.

People didn't accept URI's because they are not "human readible." I simply 
can't remember my OpenID URI identifier.People's brains only process about 
7 characters. Again, your comment only pertains to i-names, not i-numbers.

> But it would be a mistake to try and convince people to accept something 
> perceived as complicated as a replacement.

> > The Internet architects created a Internet scale naming system to replace
> > the hosts file, but they didn't see the name to create an Internet scale
> > /etc/passwd file. XRI answers this finally.
>
> Email has already staked that territory out, for better or worse.

Email addresses are re-assignable. Persistent identfiers are needed. 
That's where this conversation started. URI's are also re-assignable.

Also, what's the email address for your university? Email addresses only 
address identifiers for people.

But to digress for a minute, email is not really a good system for 
discovery. Extending SMTP for naming is not a good idea. Also, as you 
point out, Google-Yahoo-MSFT want everyone to use email because it adds 
value their media brand. Large websites want to verify email addresses 
with the issuer. So unless you want your global identifier controlled by 
one of the above, I would think you'd like an Internet scale alternative.

- Mike