Announcing YADIS...again

[Martin Atkins]

David Recordon wrote:
> Some months ago, Brad Fitzpatrick, Johannes Ernst (of NetMesh and LID),
> and myself got together to figure out how to make the OpenID and LID
> personal digital identity technologies interoperable as to leverage each
> protocol's most compelling features with each other .  We figured this
> be a good idea given that both are based on URLs as identifiers and  are
> bottom-up initiatives with fairly similar goals. Working on this
> problem, we realized quickly that what we were really building was a
> bottom-up, light-weight interoperability framework for personal digital
> identities since we addressed the problems in a quite general manner.
> 

...and after all of this faffing about and debating, I think I've
finally figured out what all of this is in aid of.

A consumer provides a single box to enter your identity URL. User enters
http://me.somewhere.com/ into the box. How do we know what kind of
identity it is? It might be an OpenID, LID or other system's URL.

Two options:
* Have the user choose "OpenID", "LID", "..." from a list in the form.
Pretty lame. Users don't know or care about the difference between
OpenID and LID.
* Have a standard way that a consumer can ask the identity server what
kind of server it is. Or, more accurately, what protocols it supports.

So we just have a mechanism for determining for a given identity URL
what protocol should be used to talk to it without asking the user. That
way multi-protocol consumers/servers can be created without requiring
users to understand how the technology works.

Have I got the jist?
If so, why didn't you just say that in the first place? :)