against using user@host identifiers

[Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon]

Xageroth Sekarius <xageroth at gmail.com> wrote:
> This only changes one thing: the user must use whatever identity
> services their host uses. That may seem like a downside but really,
> it's a non-issue. First of all, it will be a rare case that a
> LiveJournal user will not want to use LiveJournal's identity services.
> Secondly, even if they do wish to use an alternate service, it would
> be bizarre for them to use LiveJournal as their identifier at that
> point.

I think this is less bizarre than you think it is.  For example, I
have brentdax.com (my personal site, not a blog) set up to use
LiveJournal's identity servers; this way I can use my own site as my
identity--a URL I can control forever--while still letting LiveJournal
do the heavy lifting, since I trust them for now.

I could imagine someone offering an outsourced OpenID server--they
handle the hard parts, you just drop the appropriate tag onto a page
somewhere.  This is useful and proper, and as far as I can tell won't
work under your scheme.

> The e-mail address
> wasn't obvious to anyone when they first saw it.

Really?  I was very young when I first started using e-mail, but once
I understood that the circled A was an "at sign", I went "oh, that
makes sense".  The tilde has no such mnemonic, save the relatively
obscure Unix usage.

-- 
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker