YADIS as an abstraction layer

[Drummond Reed]

>Martin Atkins wrote:
>Note that in the long term people are talking about using these strange
>XRID things as a human-friendly layer on top of the URLs, which would
>allow all sorts of bizarre URLs to be used under the hood. I don't know
>much about XRI and friends, but my limited understanding leads me to
>believe that they are a layer that can be added on when people are
>ready, at which point the underlying URLs will become largely irrelevant
>in the case where a URL is used as an identity for a user.

Exactly. That's what abstraction layers do; hide the details of the layer
below. And the most useful ones are evolutionary, i.e., you only need to
adopt them as needed. IP abstracted Ethernet (& other LAN protocols); DNS
abstracted IP addresses; and XRI abstracts URLs & URIs, and each can be
adopted incrementally as the need (like the one being discussed here for
simple identity addresses) emerges.

=Drummond