redirects on openid identities

[Rev. Jeffrey Paul]

My first issue is the requirement of a trailing slash on OpenID identity
urls.  When a user enters a url, there's no way of knowing if there is a
trailing slash required - an issue when a consumer tries to convert it
into the canonical form, as required by the spec.

http://host.com/~user/ is the convention - yes.  But what of
http://host.com/file_without_an_extension (which is the w3c
recommendation for url formats)?  What about
http://host.com/users/username ? When should a consumer
append a slash and not?  Personally, I think the servers should be
smarter.  Requiring the trailing slash is unnecessarily picky, and
creates an unsolvable problem for consumers.



My primary issue is along the same lines.  If I try to validate
http://livejournal.com/~user/, the fetch of the link tags gets
redirected to http://www.livejournal.com/~user/.  My consumer then uses
the server specified within, and it gets denied as being an identity
that 'user' can't provide.  If I specify the identity
'http://www.livejournal.com/~user/', it works fine.

Should the identity provided to the server be the url after any/all
redirections, or should the server be smarter?  Personally, as
"http://livejournal.com/~username/" is a valid LJ address, I consider
this to be a bug in the LJ server implementation, but I can see the
other side, too.

The issue this raises is an ambiguity to the consumer - is the _real_ id
the (valid) one the user entered, or is it the result of the redirects?

-j

PS: My apologies if this is a little hard to follow - I've caught a cold
and DayQuil is having some fun with my brain.

-- 
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 Rev. Jeffrey Paul    -datavibe-     sneak at datavibe.net
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