On the proliferation of well-known URLs; draft-nottingham-site-meta-01

[Brad Fitzpatrick <brad at danga.com>]

I'd like to discuss the proliferation of well-known URLs, notably the new one proposed in draft-nottingham-site-meta-01.

I talked to Eran Hammer-Lahav about this, but he suggested I bring it up here:

I object to the use of /host-meta for two reasons:

1) I feel that /host-meta is too casual of a name and prone to collisions.  It matches
/^[\w\-]+$/, which I think is a subset of a fair number of sites' usernames.

2) There are already too many well-known URLs cluttering up the namespace:

/robots.txt
/favicon.ico
/crossdomain.xml

We can't fix those, but rather than
make another one (and don't kid yourself: /host-meta won't be the last
one) and make the situation worse, I propose we do the respectful thing and make a well-known
directory to put this and all future well-known files in.  e.g.:

/;well_known/host-meta

i.e. put something ugly and weird in there, like a semicolon, to minimize the chance that it interferes with people's existing URL structure.

Hopefully when the next spec decides to add a new well-known URL, they put it under /;well_known/.  "But host-meta is the final one, forever!", you say.  I doubt it.  XRD will become passé, or people will object to doing two HTTP requests when they really want to do one, so yet another well-known URL will be born.  Let's give it a future home now.

Thoughts?

- Brad