On 13 December 2012 12:54, Michael Rogers
<address@hidden> wrote:
Hi Melvin,
Sorry if the formatting's a bit odd, this email app strongly discourages inline quoting. :-)
> Dont you have the same problem in real life? You call someone "Tim" and that works until you have a large room with two people called Tim in it. Then you may need Tim A and Tim B, or firstname / lastname
True, but in a real-life social situation we can rely on goodwill and rich information like gestures, intonation and gaze direction to resolve the ambiguity. In an online interaction where security is a concern we have fewer sources of information and we need to be careful about trusting them.
> The ultimate solution to this is to have a URI to identify. The URI can be linked to the local identifier too and http is an easy method of doing this.
When it comes to interoperability I agree that URI schemes are useful. However, even if we know that, for example, a 96-character hex string is a key fingerprint, that doesn't make it any more useful as a human-readable, memorable identifier.
Totally agree, so there is benefit of tying both together. A public key is useful for machines, and a name is useful for people. Take a look at the data view of my home page and you'll see both:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmelvincarvalho.com%2FIt's neatly tied together using the new html5 data standards, i just had to add a few properties to existing tags and everything works. It even has its own query language.
Cheers,
Michael