Those Pesky Slashes

[kurt at raschke.net]

> Some users don't even know what a URL is. People from the "blogosphere"
> are usually quite knowledgable about the web and stuff, but they aren't
> the only people who will be using OpenID, and these people will likely
> be told what to type and just remember it as an opaque string without
> knowing what it actually means.
>
> If you have some like user.domain.com and some like domain.com/user then
> people who use multiple services have to remember which one is which.
>
> Also, not everyone using OpenID will have a weblog. Some will just be
> using a generic OpenID provider, or getting their OpenID identity from
> some non-weblog-hosting service. To them, user.domain.com and
> domain.com/user are both just as arbitrary since neither of them really
> point at anything anyway.

Well, I can understand that.  But then should a move to some alternate
form for OpenID identities preclude the use of URLs and <link>
autodiscovery?  That will work just fine for knowledgable users; do we
need to lower OpenID to the lowest common denominator here?  I can
understand the need for an alternate form that non-weblog users can use,
but not if it also means that weblog users who would be just fine using
their blog URL now have to remember an alternate form as well.

-Kurt