Announcing YADIS...again

[Benjamin Yu]

I'm going to "third" the comment.

After reading the docs, the goals page makes my BS meter tingle.

"to contribute a multi-vendor, multi-technology personal identity foundation
for Web 2.0."
"to follow an open, meritocratic process for doing so, e.g. by following common
open source development practices."
"to allow and foster innovation and competition within the personal digital
identity market."

Sure, quotes like this may sound like good and warm, but it's still fuzzy.

My Question: What are the *real* problems it's going to solve, and how are any
of these goals going to solve them?

"to further broaden the applicability and feature set of OpenID, LID, and of
other personal digital identity technologies"

Is it just a case of Profile exchange as Kurt asks? If so, I too agree with
Kurt.
What about things such as VCards? Videntity.org exposes many profile items on
their user's openid page. I can see some sort of standardization for profile
exposure (hopefully a light weight method) for computer system accessibility.

-Ben

--- Kurt Raschke <kurt at raschke.net> wrote:

> 
> 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
>