[OpenID] On OpenID 2.0

[Simon Willison]

On 5/1/07, Fen Labalme <fen at 2idi.com> wrote:
> The Drupal Community won't use the JanRain libraries, as Drupal is anti-PEAR
> (the PHP extension library).  So to get XRI in there, some sort of lightweight
> XRI proxy or redirect system needs to be implemented, if possible.  To me,
> this is the single most important development thread that could occur today in
> the OpenID space.

I could not agree more. If XRIs were supported by OpenID consumers
without having to build support for them in to the libraries
themselves I would feel much more comfortable about them. At the
moment, they seem to imply a significant increase in code complexity
for a feature which the vast majority of OpenID users don't currently
need, or even understand.

This is a pretty big barrier to implementation. It's safe to assume
that any large site considering adopting OpenID will want to have a
good understanding of what the libraries they are using actually do.
With XRI support, there's a bunch of extra stuff they have to
understand on top of the relatively simple OpenID 1.1.