against using user@host identifiers

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Evan Martin wrote:

> I'm surprised nobody's spelled this out before:

I thought it had come up.  I recall it even being on the website at one
point, but I can't find it now.  But for the record, I agree.

The only proper way to do email to URL mapping is via some new DNS record
type, which would totally delay adoption, to the point it's not even worth
talking about.

> OpenID asserts ownership of URLs, so identifiers should be URLs.

Yes.

> If you want to make a shortcut for URLs, use a differenct character
> (like that proposal with a tilde).  But I don't think we can agree on
> what URL foo~bar.com is a shortcut for:
>  - bar.com/foo
>  - bar.com/GetOpenIDProfile.aspx?user=foo  ;)
>  - etc.

I've heard talk of polluting the top-level directory even more like
robots.txt, favicon.ico, and cross-site-security.xml (or whatever that
Flash file is)

If a user entered:

   Username: [ brad   ]  From (OpenID server): [ livejournal.com ]

Then a consumer could hit http://livejournal.com/openid.xml

And get back:

    <openid-server-info>
     ....
      <url-map>http://www.livejournal.com/users/######</url-map>
     .....

But I hate the whole idea.

Already I'm finding that all the demo sites using OpenID are starting to
use the recommneded form field name and my browser is auto-completing my
identity URL everywhere... so I'm happy.

- Brad