On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Does this answer your question, Ross?

Yes, sort of.  My question was not so much if you can resolve handles
via bindings other than HTTP (since that's one of the selling points
of handles) as it was "do people actually use this in the real world"?

Of course, it may be impossible to answer that question since, by your
example, such people may not actually be letting anybody know that
they're doing that (although you would probably be somebody with
insider knowledge on this topic).

Also, with your use cases, would these services be impossible if the
only binding was HTTP?  Presumably dx.hellman.net would need to
harvest its metadata from somewhere, which seems like it would leave a
footprint.  It also needs some mechanism to stay in sync with the
master index.  Your non-resolution service also seems to be looking
these things up in realtime.  Would a RESTful or SOAP API (*shudder*)
not accomplish the same goal?

Really, though, the binding argument here is less the issue here than
if you believe http URIs are valid identifiers or not since there's no
reason a URI couldn't be dereferenced via other bindings, either.

-Ross.