clarifying section 11.2 in draft 11 for HTML discovery?

Peter Watkins peterw at tux.org
Fri May 25 15:18:45 UTC 2007


On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 10:19:08AM -0700, Josh Hoyt wrote:
> On 5/24/07, Peter Watkins <peterw at tux.org> wrote:
> > Shouldn't the spec clarify what is required for an HTML discovery to
> > uphold an assertion that triggers 11.2's discovery process?
> 
> The spec as it is currently written does not support using identifier
> selection with HTML discovery. That was intentional, to keep things
> simpler. A user should never have to add markup to trigger identifier
> selection. That is the responsibility of the OpenID provider.
> 
> I don't think we need to add a way to trigger identifier selection
> with HTML discovery.

Speaking as a potential OP, I like the idea that I could support directed
identity for all my users by simply adding a couple tags to a web page --
for instance, setting openid2.local_id to the identifier_select URL. HTML 
discovery's simplicity is appealing. It's also appealing to have a single
URL that would be usable in an OpenID login form and would display 
helpful content to users.

The XRI spec draft looks overwhelming. Yadis doesn't look too bad --
essentially, any old HTML page could be used, so long as it included 
one tag that contained the URL of an XRDS file. I would have found it
valuable for the openid 2.0 spec to include an example of using a 
meta http-equiv tag for Yadis discovery.

It's too bad Yadis doesn't allow embedding the XRDS document in
something like a META tag to avoid that second Yadis HTTP request,
but perhaps that's something I should take up at yadis.org. :-)

Peter




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