Backwards compatibility with existing identifiers

[Kurt Raschke]

On Nov 2, 2005, at 6:22 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:

> Thoughts?

Yes, primarily that this has come up before in the context of OpenID:
http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/yadis/2005-June/000501.html

I think that this sums it up nicely:

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

It just so happens that my email address is kurt at raschke.net and my  
homepage is at http://www.raschke.net/~kurt, but for many people the  
two bear no relation at all.  There's no reliable transformation one  
can apply to an email address to get a homepage URL.

As to people without a homepage--if they don't have a homepage, then  
why are they using OpenID?  OpenID asserts that you own a certain  
URL.  If they still want to use OpenID, so that they can show (for  
example) that they are the same person on multiple sites, they can go  
sign up with an OpenID identity provider, who will give them a URL to  
use.

OpenID is not email, so why should it use email addresses?

As to a central mapping server, the whole point of OpenID is that it  
is completely open; nobody owns it.  I don't think tampering with  
that core tenet is a good idea.

-Kurt