Re: [ogpx] Unique identities (was: Names, Identity and Protocol elements)

[Joshua Bell <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 7:35 PM, Morgaine <[e-mail]>wrote:

> Note however that you don't need to chisel bits off UUIDs in order to tag
> them with provider information.  Do it cleanly, by leaving the UUIDs safe
> and untouched as full 128-bit entities as they are supposed to be, but
> associate them with a separate unique provider field.  After all, there is
> no need for single-field atomicity nor the whole unique identity fitting
> into 128 bits.  Cramming the 2-part information into 128 bits is premature
> optimization, and is actually unhelpful since the provider field should be
> separable.
>

Further, the protocol would ideally be reasonably opaque about the contents,
much as email addresses are a constrained form of WHATEVER@DOMAIN and HTTP
URLs are a constrained form of http://DOMAIN/WHATEVER - it's up to the
authority (the domain) to decide whether it's using autoincrementing row
numbers, UUIDs, human readable names, punycode, etc.

I probably said this last year, but I'm a fan of using URLs whenever
possible. This lets us avoid defining a new global registry for these
Authorities - we already have one (i.e. DNS).

This also avoids having the protocol dictate implementation details to
service providers. And I'm a REALLY big fan of that.

Joshua