The Wiki, iNames and OpenID accounts

[Kevin Turner]

> AG> 1) As http://xri.net/=avery/(+myopenid) resolves to
> AG> aglasser.myopenid.com - shouldn't this work as a valid OpenID
> AG> Identity URL?

I think the answer would normally be yes, but you've stumbled on to a
weird intersection of Yadis and the xri.net resolver interface.

Here's what's going on:

You've entered an identifier starting with 'http://', so the RP is
treating this as a URI.  It goes to do Yadis discovery on it, and issues
a HTTP request with an XRDS content type, because Yadis uses XRDS files.

xri.net, on the other hand, is not exactly your average URL forwarding
service like, say, OCLC's PURL service is.  It's an XRI proxy resolver.
So when it gets this HTTP request, it does *not* just issue the redirect
to aglasser.myopenid.com that you expect, it checks its inputs and says
"oh, I shouldn't issue a redirect here, this is an XRI resolution client
that wants an XRDS document."  This is all according to plan as
specified in section 4.2 of the XRI Resolution specification (v2.0 WD
10).  Since service endpoint selection has *not* been requested and XRDS
output *has*, it returns the XRDS for =avery.

Now the OpenID RP receives this document, says "ah-hah, it is an XRDS,
and the XRDS has an OpenID endpoint defined in it, Yadis discovery was
successful!" and goes on to use that service endpoint with the URI you
entered as your identifier.

> AG> 2) If the answer to #1 is yes, shouldn't I be able to use
> AG> =avery(+myopenid) as a valid iname for authenticating to the wiki?

If you enter =avery/(+myopenid), the RP code treats your identifier as
an XRI and asks the proxy resolver to do service endpoint selection on
that XRI, specifying an OpenID service endpoint type.  I don't
understand how the XRI's path component influences service endpoint
selection well enough to say for certain what's supposed to happen in
this case, but what it currently does is returns the full XRDS for
=avery.

See also the August 15th thread on Heraldry-dev, "XRI openid endpoint
selection".  ( http://xrl.us/svnu ), and the following conference call
(no archives, need to pick brains).

Cheers,

 - Kevin