looking up domain names with unassigned code points

[Martin Duerst]

At 00:07 08/05/13, John C Klensin wrote:

>I think there is a place for the latter, more local, type of
>identifier as well and that,

Yes, of course. In everybody's head, in bookmark files, in
Web pages, and so on.

>in particular, one area in which
>the Internet is not fully mature yet is that of personal aliases
>in which a user can decide what to call a particular object and
>have that decision honored by relevant applications software and
>environments.

I'd not 'blame' that on the Internet. It is essentially a local
function, not a network function. The mechanisms to make it work
cross-application are already available: On each OS, there is
functionality to register applications as resolvers for particular
URIs, this mechanism can easily be used e.g. with a my: URI schema
or something similar. There are also facilities such as SGML/XML
catalogs (see e.g.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html)
for URI mapping, and it's also easily possible to implement the
desired functionality in an HTTP proxy or with a simple CGI.
A friend of mine had such a thing, he simply called it
"do the right thing".
 
>That might include aliases that trigger selection
>lists of the "which of these did you really mean?" variety.

Of course. Technically easy, HTTP already has "multiple choice",
and if you don't want to use that, just put the choices on
a Web page.

>But
>my personal aliases are normally useful to me and not to you.
>If we agree that they should be useful to you, we need to be
>running similar software, you need to know that a given personal
>alias belongs to me and not to you or someone else, you need to
>know where my alias databases are located and have access to
>them,  and so on.

There is quite some research on shared bookmarks and similar
stuff.

The reason that all this stuff above is not widely used is that
sharing of personal identifiers is very hard, not technically
but content-wise. I wouldn't want to share my personal identifiers
with just anybody, and I don't think there will be many people
who's personal identifiers I could make use off, either in
bulk (all or most of the identifiers used by a person) or
only individually (single identifiers).

Apart from that, many people identify many things not by an
explicit (textual) label, but by other means, such as
"halfway down on the right side of that Web page" or so.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp