against using user@host identifiers

[Paul Crowley]

Evan Martin wrote:
> I'm surprised nobody's spelled this out before:
> user at host, while cute, are already well-understood as email addresses.
>  As soon as [random user x] sees a form that says "enter your id \n
> example: foo at bar.com", they're gonna enter smileygirl at aol.com and get
> a bad experience when that fails.

How is that different from them entering their web provider URL and 
finding that that fails?  The failure won't be ugly - just a message 
saying "oh, it seems that aol.com don't provide OpenID authentication. 
To get yourself an OpenID, try one of these providers..."

But I'm not really pushed about this - I can see the arguments the other 
way.

> If you want to make a shortcut for URLs, use a differenct character
> (like that proposal with a tilde). 

Tilde is fairly standard identifier for home directories.  It works on 
LiveJournal, for example.  So I don't think we need a special "tilde 
proposal" - I can already use livejournal.com/~ciphergoth as an OpenID 
and that'll do fine.
-- 
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\/ o\ Paul Crowley, paul at ciphergoth.org
/\__/ http://www.ciphergoth.org/