Re: Why have a multipart document address?

[Jeff Rush <jeff@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 09:41 -0700, Art Pollard wrote:
> 
> One issue as far as addresses are concerned is how do you pass around
> works.
> 
> Has anybody given any thought to this issue ?

Thought, yes.  In my conversations with several Xanadu people, including
Ted, I've never gotten a good answer to the 'URI' question, other than
that tumblers are NOT to be exposed to the general public, but that some
other, yet to be defined, layer above that.

Since Roger just now said that any facility to search using external
strings or numbers is not included, I'm at a bit of a loss now as to how
a human-readable URI would be translated by a front-end into a tumbler
address in a scalable way.  The DNS system provides some of that "string
=> number" mapping for the web, but Xanadu strives to avoid reliance
upon DNS.

It still seems there needs a be a basic way to assign brief, textual
"labels" to information.  At one point the suggestion was that a file-
like name could be assigned to any document, by linking the document to
a textual title/filename string.  That's fine, but I still need a way to
specify all/part of that title so as to search for the link.  Once that
is done, I can grab one endpoint of that link, and follow it back to the
document.

The question remains; what was Xanadu going to use for the human-
readable URI?  What do I put on my business card, my letterhead, in TV
ads, on billboards that points back to my content?

-Jeff