[OpenID] Profile image sizes

[Simon Willison]

On 4/22/07, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> SO, here's what I recommend:
>
> * Inherit as much as you can from the vcard standard. It's already
> been figured out, and with hcard, has been converted to an
> HTML-format.
> * Push a naming convention like http://tld.com/avatar.jpg just like
> http://tld.com/favicon.ico is the standard for Favicons.

I'm strongly against the naming convention, for a bunch of reasons.
Firstly, it limits people to just using .jpg avatars when .png or .gif
make perfectly valid alternatives. Secondly, it doesn't work for
people who's OpenID is in a subdirectory as opposed to owning their
own domain / subdomain. Thirdly, naming convention URLs are just plain
nasty - they encourage people to check the same place on lots of
different servers, which fills log files with 404 errors. More
arguments here:
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-October/006469.html