OpenID + Simple Registration Information Exchange

[Jonathan Daugherty]

#   - is this really only about "registration"? It seems to have much
# broader applicability

As David pointed out, this really is just about registration.  This
isn't a comprehensive solution to the profile exchange problem;
rather, this targets a very large majority of registration use cases.

#  - you are defining a new vocabulary for VCard-type information, and
# unfortunately, this industry has already many, many, many, too many,
# none of which is compatible with any other. What about not adding
# another, and you simply took the XML-VCard vocabulary, and
# interpreted your tag names as XPaths?

The fields used in this simple registration extension do happen to
coincide with those of vCard, FOAF, etc., but since this is just for
registration it is not meant to be an open-ended, generic profile
exchange mechanism.  It'd be misleading to use a vocabulary that looks
like vCard, but isn't.

Many fields in a vCard in particular are not going to be necessary (or
even remotely useful) for registering on *most* websites in *most*
registration situations.  Granted, that information might be useful to
someone populating an address book with your vCard, but it probably
won't be necessary or even optional if you just want to read the New
York Times on the web.  (Some concrete examples of vCard fields that
don't apply are encoding, character set, geo location, organizational
information, and logo.)

This extension specifies a small number of fields with trivial data
formatting requirements.  If you or anyone else can find a preexisting
vocabulary or specification that meets these needs, we'd be glad to
hear about it.

-- 
  Jonathan Daugherty
  JanRain, Inc.