[mb-style] RFV: OnlineCommunityRelationshipType

[Alexander Dupuy]

Nikki wrote:

>5 official homepages, 4 fan pages (only 9 now, it seems). Of the 4 which
>are Russian, 3 as official homepages and 1 as a fan page.
>

I was actually wondering about the MySpace pages before we had a 
separate MySpace AR.  I suppose it would be difficult to get that data 
retrospectively.


Schika wrote:

> if the artist use some unconventional chars in his LJ-name, the 
> proposed url-type h++p://<artist>.livejournal.com/ can't be used (a 
> try to open that URL results with the well loved 404 error). Only the 
> 'old' profile links will work

> In my case, the LJ-name of the artist starts with an underscore "_" 


Steve Wyles replied:

>Yes, that is because underscores arn't valid anywhere in host or domain 
>names.
>

The leading underscore in LJ usernames is a known (and apparently not 
infrequent) problem, and is explicitly discussed in the 
OnlineCommunityRelationshipType wiki page.  There's a good discussion of 
underscores in DNS at http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/underscore.html; 
the bottom line is that they are legal in DNS, but not for hostnames 
(although most implementations will allow them to be used) and leading 
underscores are reserved for special uses like SRVLOC (RFC 2872).

In order to support clients that can't deal with underscores at all, LJ 
maps (non-leading) hyphen characters in domain names to underscores in 
user names (apparently, hyphens aren't allowed in usernames).  But this 
doesn't work for leading underscores, since leading hyphens are not 
allowed in any DNS name.  This needs to be mentioned on the wiki page as 
well.

Although it's clear that LJ prefers the use of <artist>.livejournal.com 
in URLs, I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better for MB to mandate use 
of the http://users.livejournal.com/<artist> format, just for 
consistency.  This could be encouraged by having the JavaScript 
auto-AR-selection only choose the online-community AR for URLs in the 
(users|community).livejournal.com format.

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com