[PROPOSAL] Handle "http://user at example.com" Style Identifiers

[David Nicol]

On 11/9/06, David Fuelling <sappenin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can you provide an example (real or otherwise) of such a scenario?  Do you
> really envision any domain owner giving 'http://blah@example.com' to one
> person, whilst giving 'mailto:blah at example.com' to a different user?

any university will have, for instance, xyzzy at any.edu for a student e-mail
address while their u-provided home page (if any) might not be anywhere
near http://any.edu/xyzzy and http://xyzzy@any.edu is also pretty
unlikely.  That's
not the direction you asked for the transform in.

The standard used to be http://any.edu/~xyzzy but that may be nearly obsolete.

mapping from blah at example.com to http://blah@example.com just won't
work in a lot of settings, or would take years and an army of lawyers.  Not
because http://blah@example.com is invalid, but it is unlikely to be under
blah's control.  http://sappenin@gmail.com (cool addy, btw) certainly won't
get anyone to David Fuelling's home page, now or in any likely future.

Ideas:

(1) define a way to include an e-mail address among the things obtainable
with an OpenID authentication, and a transform to provide a default when
none is declared

(2a) declare that OpenID does not do e-mail based authentication and never will

(2b) name some other mechanism for e-mail based authentication and include
it by reference, blessing said method by so doing.

-- 
perl -le'1while(1x++$_)=~/^(11+)\1+$/||print'