Those Pesky Slashes

[Ben Hyde]

> something about those pesky slashes

I don't think your doing the user any favors by obscuring that the 
openID is the URL of a page.

It's fine to have some clean up in step 4 of my ping pong drawing [1] 
but it shouldn't be too ornate!

The cleanup should be identical everywhere.  It would be bad to 
encourage "competition" in
the clean up step.  If sites start competing[2] to see who can be more 
clever it will only lead to
such variation that users will have no idea what to enter when they 
arrive at a strange site.

I think it's a really bad idea to have the user ID look like an email 
address.  URLs are not email
addresses - if you build a arbitrary bridge between the two name spaces 
your merging to
concepts that users understand into one confusing whole.   That Jabber 
and Microsoft Messenger
both did this is no excuse.

So there.  Love the slash!

  - ben

[1] 
http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2005/05/openid-part-iii-pingpong/

[2] The most obvious idea is that sites let users enter their local 
user name and the
site rewrites that into their OpenID URL.  I think that should be 
explicitly discouraged, or
explicitly part of the spec.

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