YADIS as an abstraction layer

[Martin Atkins]

Lukas Leander Rosenstock wrote:
> 
> I agree with what you said, still I believe it is a good idea. As a
> fallback solution it would still be possible to try again with the URL
> itself and then following a Link-Tag in the (X)HTML, then everyone could
> use it, however I think it would be used very rarely (it reduces
> performance and causes traffic).

Having two cases is bad enough. Having a third is just asking for
implementations to be spotty, as people only implement the common cases
and ignore the extras.

> With the URLs, why not enforce some simpler usernames? I don't think
> someone really has to use things like
> https://server:4223/users/id/script.cgi?user=name as their personal
> logon name, most identity URLs today look simple as
> "brad.livejournal.com" and it is good that way. If I have the
> "visionary" look I see for example just entering my friends' unified
> usernames (-> URLs) into my calendar and the software sets up
> appointment sharing etc., I (if I were a non-tech) would like to see
> simple and, yes, unified usernames (maybe only hostnames) that can be
> converted into a URL. A simple webspace from a typical mainstream
> webhost company with domain catchall can easily create many simple
> identites like firstname.familyname.tld or name.company.tld so I would
> look from this perspective and not some strange uncommon systems.
> 

Some identity servers are being shoe-horned into existing applications,
including a whole load of rather badly-written PHP CMS software. URLs
like that suck, but they are going to happen, especially at first while
everyone's still just playing around with this stuff.

Note that in the long term people are talking about using these strange
XRID things as a human-friendly layer on top of the URLs, which would
allow all sorts of bizarre URLs to be used under the hood. I don't know
much about XRI and friends, but my limited understanding leads me to
believe that they are a layer that can be added on when people are
ready, at which point the underlying URLs will become largely irrelevant
in the case where a URL is used as an identity for a user.