[OT] Re: User @ domain.tld as ID (Once again)

[Christopher E. Granade]

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Please excuse this incredibly off-topic post, but just wanted to respond
to some things about homogenity of the user at domain idiom.

Martin Atkins wrote:
> But I do not have one ID for everything. All of those things you
> listed have a similar appearance, but they are all different...
This is, in many ways, a side-effect of a lack of unification of
standards, lack of support, etc. Though e-mail, SIP and Jabber use three
very different methods of resolution, there is no fundamental reason why
they have to be different names.

My e-mail address is cgranade at greens.org, in part because I have a user
account at greens.org that has an mbox associated with it. There is no
reason that greens.org could not run a Jabber server and similarly link
the Jabber ID cgranade at greens.org to the local user account
cgranade at greens.org. They do not, however, run an XMPP server, so this
is not done in practice.

If we consider an example set of services mapped to the DNS name
example.com, including XMPP, SIP and e-mail, then there is no reason
that the IDs for all three services could not be identical, and
furthermore, equal to the UNIX-style username for shell and FTP/SCP
logins. Many mail servers already link POP3 accounts to local accounts.

On the converse, there is no reason to link user IDs for SIP/POP3/XMPP
to local usernames, either. One might as well link them to LDAP entries,
database records, etc.

Note that I don't advocate OID support for user at domain idioms, but I
will point out that if it is found to be useful to implement this, one
could do it by asking the domain for a URL for that user. For example:

- --> GET http://example.com/?oid=joeuser
<-- REDIRECT http://www.example.com/~joeuser/

Again, this kind of approach would be simple to do with mod_rewrite.

Also, I would like to remind that this example was only how to do it,
not an advocacy that it be done.

- --Chris
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