See
http://www.softarmor.com/wgdb/docs/draft-schulzrinne-sipping-id-relationships-00.txt
for an expired draft on this topic.
There is an architectural 'trick' here, that I suspect is the key for
making thing homogenize in a way that is tractable:
The underlying specifications permit you to have different
addresses, for different services. They also permit you to have the
*same* address.
So the fact that your jabber and email and... (whatever) services all
get data to you via "harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" is an administrative choice,
not one imposed by some grand unifying architecture that needed to be
designed perfectly from the start.
The only "architectural" rule needed for this is to recommend that folks
base new adddressing on an existing scheme, to avoid collissions. For
example, an administrative rule that foo:harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx is only
available for registration to the recipient of
mailto:harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx is all that is needed to make this work.
(Anyone paying close attention will note that this introduces a problem
with getting a foo: address that is not the same as the email address
but is not assigned to anyone else. But what the heck, I'm not trying to
design the whole thing right now...)
At any rate, this is a version of the "think globally, act locally"
approach to architecture design that good Internet technical work did well.
d/
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