[jdev] Authority component in xmpp: URIs

[Massimiliano Mirra]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Peter Saint-Andre
stpeter-at-stpeter.im |jdev2| <...> wrote:
> Massimiliano Mirra wrote:
>> Are these two URIs equivalent?
>>
>>   xmpp:foo at bar.org
>>   xmpp:///foo@bar.org (notice triple slash)
>
> No, they are not. In fact, the second one is not even a valid XMPP URI
> because an XMPP URI with an authority component is constructed as follows:
>
> xmpp://authcomp/node@host
>
> Where "authcomp" cannot be empty, because it too is of the form
> node at host.

That's what I feared.  I guess I'll have to pinch my nose real hard
here because apparently Mozilla can parse URIs in the form of foo:bar
but turns them into foo:///bar internally.

> If I had my way, we would remove the authority component from XMPP URIs
> entirely, because they are extremely confusing and unnecessary. Perhaps
> we can do that with rfc5122bis. :)

I guess you say so because you're thinking of the scenario
(admittedly, the most common) where a web page points to an
XMPP entity.  The page would have no knowledge of the account the
visitor is going to use to interact with that entity.

On the other hand I'm thinking of the scenario where a URI is
generated on the client side to uniquely identify an entity.  The
account information in this case is available and relevant:
xmpp://joe@home/mom@home is very different than
xmpp://cto@bigcorp/mom@home.  Imagine saving those as one-click
shortcuts.  Without the authority part, the client would have to ask
the user what account to use.  It could save the account-entity
association in some proprietary way, but the URI seems
more elegant and portable to me.

Anyway, thanks for clarifying. :)

Massimiliano