Backwards compatibility with existing identifiers
Kurt Raschke
kurt at raschke.net
Wed Nov 2 17:20:14 PST 2005
On Nov 2, 2005, at 6:22 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Thoughts?
Yes, primarily that this has come up before in the context of OpenID:
http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/yadis/2005-June/000501.html
I think that this sums it up nicely:
> OpenID asserts ownership of URLs, so identifiers should be URLs.
It just so happens that my email address is kurt at raschke.net and my
homepage is at http://www.raschke.net/~kurt, but for many people the
two bear no relation at all. There's no reliable transformation one
can apply to an email address to get a homepage URL.
As to people without a homepage--if they don't have a homepage, then
why are they using OpenID? OpenID asserts that you own a certain
URL. If they still want to use OpenID, so that they can show (for
example) that they are the same person on multiple sites, they can go
sign up with an OpenID identity provider, who will give them a URL to
use.
OpenID is not email, so why should it use email addresses?
As to a central mapping server, the whole point of OpenID is that it
is completely open; nobody owns it. I don't think tampering with
that core tenet is a good idea.
-Kurt
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