User @ domain.tld as ID (Once again)

[Daniel E. Renfer]

Matthew A. Nicholson wrote:
> Sorry to bring this up again, I am new to OpenID and I breifly read 
> through some of the user at domain.tld posts.  Before I go any futher, I 
> think a decentralized ID system is an excellent idea, the only problem 
> I see with it so far, is it's reliance on URL's as identifiers.
>
The trick that I was working on for my client on my personal site, 
(which has been put on hold for now) is to keep a list of known domains 
that support OpenId, that expose the username in the url. This would 
only work for my site, and for sites that I have listed, but if someone 
were to log in with the url: duck1123 at livejournal.com, then my client 
would look up livejournal.com in it's list of known domains and 
transform the identity to http://www.livejournal.com/users/duck1123/. If 
someone tries to enter an unknown identity in the form of user at host, 
they'll just get an error that that domain could not be found, meaning 
they'll have to enter their full url. (possibly sending a message to me, 
so I can add that pattern to my list.)

If anyone is interested in working with me on list, I think it would be 
handy to keep some sort of master list that other sites could could sync 
up with to find domains that show usernames in the URL.

It would also be cool if sites that gave out openid's with usernames in 
the url would list their regex pattern in the meta of their site. That 
way, if my consumer can't find a rule for 'livejournal.com' in it's 
list, then it could hit http://www.livejournal.com/ to look for a 
pattern there, or else fail.

This is something that would only work on clients that support it, with 
servers that support it, but shouldn't require any changes to openid at 
all. (the actual identity transfered is still the normal HTTP URL)

What do you think?
Daniel E. Renfer (http://kronkltd.net/)