[whatwg] Reserving XRI and URN in registerProtocolHandler

[Brett Zamir]

I'd like to propose reserving two protocols for use with 
navigator.registerProtocolHandler: "urn" and "xri" (or possibly xriNN 
where NN is a version number).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifier for info 
on XRI (basically allows the equivalents of URN but with a user-defined 
namespace and without needing ICANN/IANA approval). Although it was 
rejected earlier, I don't see that there is any other way for sites to 
create their own categorization or other behavior mechanisms in a way 
which is well-namespaced, does not rely on waiting for official 
approval, and has the benefits of working with the HTML5 specification 
as already designed.

URN is something which I think also deserves to be reserved, if not all 
IANA protocols.

As I see it, the only way for a site to innovate safely in avoiding 
conflicts for non-IANA protocols is to use XRI (assuming especially if 
it can be officially reserved).

And all of this would be enhanced, in my view, if my earlier proposal 
for defaultURIs and alternateURIs attributes on <a/> could be accepted 
as well: 
http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg20066.html in 
that it makes it much more likely that people would actually use any of 
these protocols.

thank you,
Brett