URL relationship permanence

[David Recordon]

Sorry for not threading this right, but have digest and am mailing list inept.

Brad gave me a call wanting to clarify the following issue since he is out of the
office right now back up in Portland.  His feeling is that the second URL,
http://mysite.com is the correct URL to be using.  You do not want to use tinyurl.com
with its redirection.

In regards to disallowing redirection, he says we should not do so.  Rather there 
are valid redirection cases such as example.com -> www.example.com which is quite
common practice.  Additionally, some sites may use the equivalent of
web.example.com translated into their local language.  Thus the redirect from
example to com would not goto www.example.com.

--David

> Sorry for the thread hijack but since everyone's debating URLs, could 
> someone enlighten me what a consumer is supposed to show as someone's OpenID 
> url in the following chain:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/something/ (302-redirect to)
> http://mysite.com/ (openid.delegate as)
> http://livejournal.com/users/someone (302-redirect to)
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/someone/
> 
> I'm inclined to pick the second as the user URL and the spec would agree, 
> but I think it was more intended for the situation of URL 3 becoming URL 4. 
> Everyone realizes that three and four are identical, but that's not going to 
> be true for 1 becoming 2.
> 
> I'm not advocating picking 1 as the URL, but I would like to know how the 
> consumer is supposed to handle it? If it does nothing and the user is 
> posting a comment, then they will be wondering why it's showing their domain 
> and not the tinyurl as they had intended; or the consumer does an extra 
> check and returns an error if the redirection moves to a different domain 
> (livejournal.com <-> www.livejournal.com is fine, tinyurl.com -> mysite.com 
> is not).