[GNUnet-developers] URI format

[icepick]

Hi,

I found out about your new release on freshmeat today.  What drew me in 
was a mention about shorter URI support. I love URI's.  Ask my 
coworkers, I use them as nouns in all my IM (it's not "bug #1777", it's 
"http://bugs.mycompany.com/1777";).  It one of the key features I've been 
adding to Mnet 0.7.

Not having a example of a URI on your front page, I went digging in your 
 FAQ and found this:

gnunet://afs/22BC3B01EF16C2814C23D0401D6C54FFD82C5AB2.8998DE34E06F380661B4EBC5991D06C90CD69CFA.7A1AC901.3201028

I have a few suggestions about how this could be improved:

1) use or support standards already created

There are a few ideas running around about how to identify stuff on p2p 
networks.  One of my favorite use the URN format (URN's are a type of 
URI's):

urn:sha1:<SHA1 Sum of file in Base32>

e.g.

urn:sha1:YJPVMW37VNYRPOAEBUIWM5X6ADF6T3NQ

This is nice and short.  Gnutella uses these.  There is a whole catalog 
of stuff you can find at bitzi.com that has a sha1 urn like that.

To support some of the more information that you want there is also the 
Magnet URI spec 
(http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/magnet-draft-overview.txt) which is 
very widely used (kazaa uses it).  It doesn't specify a hashing 
algorithm, but allows for many different systems to use the same syntax. 
 This will allow you to embed all the info that you have in your 
current AFS URI scheme.  It also unfortunately uses "&" :(.

Being able to support the exact same URI types as other applications is 
I think a good goal to work on.  That way users can try GNUnet for 
something (taking advantage of the the potential anonymity), but then be 
able to fallback on older p2p networks if GNUnet doesn't have it. 
Applications should be written to then have the data published into 
GNUnet so that the next person doesn't have to fallback on the older 
non-anonymous networks.

if you don't want to make suggestion #1 you should maybe take these 
other ideas under consideration:

2) Don't use HEX/Base16, use Base32

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3548.html outlines hex/base16, base32 and 
base64.  Base64 has chars in it's alphabet that can't be used in URI's 
thus base32 is a good choice (and used in the above sha1 urn scheme)

3) Don't use the "//" after "gnunet:".  According to the RFC "//" means 
the next bit of the URI is a host name you can look up via DNS.

an AFS uri would then look like:

gnunet:afs:YJPVMW37VNYRPOAEBUIWM5X6ADF6T3NQ.KQPVMW37VNYRPOAEBUIWM5X6ADF6T3NQ.WM5X.300010

Anyway... my $.02...

icepick