Harald Alvestrand wrote:
one nice thing about the schema/protocol being part of the naming scheme is that it does *not* tie me to a single provider for all services - my jabber service for [EMAIL PROTECTED] is provisioned from someone who's got no relationship at all to my mail and web services.
There is an architectural 'trick' here, that I suspect is the key for making thing homogenize in a way that is tractable:
The underlying specifications permit you to have different addresses, for different services. They also permit you to have the *same* address.
So the fact that your jabber and email and... (whatever) services all get data to you via "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" is an administrative choice, not one imposed by some grand unifying architecture that needed to be designed perfectly from the start.
The only "architectural" rule needed for this is to recommend that folks base new adddressing on an existing scheme, to avoid collissions. For example, an administrative rule that foo:[EMAIL PROTECTED] is only available for registration to the recipient of mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] is all that is needed to make this work.
(Anyone paying close attention will note that this introduces a problem with getting a foo: address that is not the same as the email address but is not assigned to anyone else. But what the heck, I'm not trying to design the whole thing right now...)
At any rate, this is a version of the "think globally, act locally" approach to architecture design that good Internet technical work did well.
d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
