FYI - Jeff Hodges of NeuStar, an observer on the XRI TC, asked me to pass along the following info:

FYI, the guidelines and procedures for registering new URI schemes (e.g. "xri:") with IANA (nee IETF) are being revised and are essentially baked. It's been approved for publication as a RFC and will be denoted as a "best current practice (BCP)". It does not yet have an RFC number assigned AFAICT.

It'd probably be a good idea for xri: mavens to review this.

Note that it includes this text, in part at the behest of the W3C TAG..

2.1. Demonstratable, new, long-lived utility

The use and deployment of new URI schemes in the Internet infrastructure is costly; some parts of URI processing may be scheme- dependent, and deployed software already processes URIs of well-known schemes. Introducing a new URI scheme may require additional software, not only for client software and user agents but also in additional parts of the network infrastructure (gateways, proxies, caches).[13]. URI schemes constitute a single, global namespace; it is desirable to avoid contention over use of short, mneumonic scheme names. For these reasons, the unbounded registration of new schemes is harmful. New URI schemes SHOULD have clear utility to the broad Internet community, beyond that available with already registered URI schemes.

JeffH