OASIS mad for a better web

Well, its my first news post of 2003, and a welcome return(?) for cheesy puntastic titles :D

An international standards body announced Wednesday that it has taken on the task of improving on the ubiquitous URL, or Web address, to give developers a cleaner way to design and locate Web services.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) said it has formed a technical committee to work out how resources--such as data and services--can be placed and found on a network without their being tied to a URL on a specific machine.

To do this, the committee is designing the OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI), a method for identifying any resource--from a Web service to a particular file--across different network domains, applications and transport protocols.

"XRI syntax will be fully federated, the way DNS (domain name system) and IP (Internet Protocol) addressing are today, yet will still address the problem of how to identify the same logical resource stored in different physical locations," said OneName Chief Technology Officer Drummond Reed, co-chair of the OASIS XRI Technical Committee, in a statement.

View: OASIS to build a better Web address