Announcing YADIS...again

[Kurt Raschke]

On Oct 25, 2005, at 7:40 PM, Carl Howells wrote:

> I've read through the documentation provided, and I'm a bit  
> confused by all of this.  How does having this protocol make things  
> easier?

I'd like to second that.  My first thought upon looking at the YADIS  
spec was "Is this for real?".  To me, the benefit of OpenID is that  
it is a relatively lightweight protocol and it is simple to implement  
for both producers and consumers.  LID, on the other hand, seems to  
be bloated and pretty painful to implement.  Now we have a  
"Capability Discovery Protocol" and all sorts of other things.

If the goal is just to put profile exchange on top of OpenID, I am  
sure it could have been done without requiring the overhead of LID.

Brad once said (http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/yadis/2005-June/ 
000924.html):

"It's possible we might use LID as one of our recommended profile  
exchange mechanisms in the future, but the spec as a whole was too  
heavy."

and frankly I think that still holds true.  Now we've got this  
enormous ball of wax called YADIS, which really doesn't seem like an  
improvement.

And what of existing OpenID producers and consumers?  Look at the  
guestbook demo, for example.  What benefits are there for consumers  
like those to have OpenID get any more complicated?

YADIS seems like a massive step backwards to me.

-Kurt