Directed Identity and the '#' symbol

SitG Admin sysadmin at shadowsinthegarden.com
Sun Apr 26 00:51:04 UTC 2009


I thought the idea with generation fragments was that the user would 
enter 'site.net/myname' and the OP would use Directed Identity to 
turn that into 'site.net/myname#2' (for the second user to have that 
name), not that the user would enter said generation fragments 
themself. That said, I just experimented with appending '#generation' 
manually, and confirmed that this was treated as a different URI 
(which was only to be expected, since the specs permit any string 
that would be a legal URL).

I was *hoping* to find a character that would be ignored ('#' seemed 
most likely, since Directed Identity doesn't rely on it being entered 
as part of the original URI), one that I could use to parse out 
additional parameters such as '#SecretAccessCode0123' and '#WML' - 
these would be stored on my server's side, then used as preferences 
when the user returned. But since it's conceivable that a user might 
have an actual URI ending in (for example) '#WML', *removing* these 
from the input before my RP decides to treat the whole string as a 
URI and performs discovery on it, may inadvertently mangle the user's 
URI.

I'm inclined to go ahead with this method for now, since I doubt many 
users *will* have a URI like that, and I doubt many users will be 
browsing the site where this is implemented in any case (so it's not 
like I'll be giving millions of users the wrong idea about permitted 
characters). But if any of you currently planning future updates to 
the specs have a better idea for what character to use as a 
delimiter, I'd love to hear it :)

-Shade



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