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.