Announcing YADIS...again

[Kurt Raschke]

On Oct 28, 2005, at 6:52 PM, Adrian.Blakey at kp.org wrote:

> Yadis is a very serious attempt made by some seriously smart people  
> to develop someting useful.

And where is the evidence of this?  As pointed out by several others  
on the list (NOT just me), all we have thus far is a set of buzzword- 
riddled specifications that seem to ruin the simplicity of OpenID by  
apparently merging it with LID, a far-from-lightweight protocol.

> Stop complaining.

If you want me to stop complaining, then show me hard evidence that  
YADIS is an improvement over OpenID.  I would not say that  
interoperability alone is an improvement.  As Martin Atkins noted,  
intermediaries and multi-protocol identity servers are both feasible  
solutions to the problem of multiple, incompatible identity protocols  
that don't require tampering with existing protocols.  Look at  
TypeKey, for example.  TypeKey added OpenID support, and now every  
TypeKey user has an OpenID identity as well.  They could just as  
easily add support for LID or whatever the next big identity protocol  
is, without requiring consumers to change anything.

YADIS, on the other hand, seems to want for every party to be _both_  
a LID and OpenID producer or consumer, and that doesn't make sense.   
How does that improve LID?  How does that improve OpenID?  It makes  
OpenID bulkier, and I can't see at all what it does for LID.  Similar  
to the situation with TypeKey, if an OpenID producer site wants its  
users to have LID identities as well, they're free to add that  
functionality if they want.  And it certainly doesn't take the bulk  
of YADIS to do that.

Finally:  Is stand-alone OpenID as it exists today going away?  If  
not, then I'll shut up.  But if OpenID (a useful, lightweight  
protocol) as we know it is going away, then I think there needs to be  
a serious discussion of the merits of this decision.

And can we keep this on-list, please?

-Kurt