> Let’s say I have a foaf.xml
> document somewhere at
> xxx.com/aaa/me.xml. How (1) do I
> tell people that it’s there, (2)
> know that it adheres to foaf and
> (3)make it accessible and parseable
> quickly by a gprs phone?

It could all be done but your points are very well taken and thought-provoking. Fewer moving parts, less indirection, Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

Now, for most people and even many programmers, a web-style interaction will seem simplest. But if that abstraction is done cleanly and universally, then fine!

Very interesting idea.

Web-based conventions can provide the same data structures as .tel, of course. (and making converters to-and-from .tel zonefiles would be trivial). Defining data structures to hold contact info is nothing new. But what web-based conventions can’t do is make it very easy to discover and/or use this data. Let’s say I have a foaf.xml document somewhere at xxx.com/aaa/me.xml. How (1) do I tell people that it’s there, (2) know that it adheres to foaf and (3) make it accessible and parseable quickly by a gprs phone?

I need to publish that info somewhere, and if it doesn’t replace directly my other channels of communications, I need to also publish those as well. What we want to do is literally supersede every comm channel with the .tel. No more phone numbers, no more emails. Just a .tel where you make one DNS query and get what you need.

Why make a DNS query to get the ip of the server hosting the foaf doc, then make an html query to get the foaf doc, then parse the potentially overcomplicated xml file when you can stop in the first step of making a DNS query and instantly having what you need?
I’d like to see in the future the ability to type “johndoe” or “hertz” on my phone dialpad and press the call button. That’s much easier to remember than a string of numbers. Let the phone make a dns query to hertz.tel, and propose the few numbers there for me to choose from.