It would seem that the current specification for MAGNET-URI's does not allow
referencing single resources via multiple identifiers or names? The most
common and useful example is to specify several hashing algorithm's output for
a given resource so that the magnet scheme implementation can decide which to
use for locating the resource by its URI.

Currently, MAGNET-URI's are in fact allowed to specify multiple resources
using a single resource indicator, which would make any such feature to
provide multiple identifiers for a specific resource extremely ambiguous and
awkward to implement. I propose that the MAGNET-URI scheme be simplified such
that separate URIs must be required to refer to separate resources to allow for
multiple identifier names to exist as a description for the same resource.

I realize that this makes implementation much more difficult within web
browsers and other generic viewers, but I feel I must point out that
cooperation with other clients currently supporting otherwise completely
unrelated schemes is not a concern for MAGNET. Tying the specification with
these clients may hinder future development of the specification and even
adoption as a formal standard.

For the consideration of this mailing list I have provided the following
illustrated example:


magnet:?xt=urn:md5:94691d3ca097538863e694dd4c199359&xt=urn:sha1:4e905b1911663d35\
7cef5da8e7106c1f9ebfd856


P.S. For those interested, my implementation of the MAGNET-URI scheme is in
the form of a command-line utility which uses the giFT peer-to-peer framework
(http://www.giftproject.org/) for satisfying requests. The not-yet-complete
script may be found at:

http://jasta.gotlinux.org/gift/gish-uri


--
Josh Guilfoyle
http://jasta.gotlinux.org/