[OpenID] User and password instead of OpenID URL?

[Martin Atkins]

thomas Armstrong wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I create web tools using OpenID for my customers. One of them don't
> like it and find it "hard to understand" because it forces users to
> type their "OpenID URL" instead of their user and password.
> 
> I try to explain it that OpenID is more comfortable for users because
> it doesn't require user+passwd every time and you must remember only
> one URL.
> 
> But all my systems are designed to use OpenID as a SSO. Do you have
> any experience switching from OpenID URL to user+pass without removing
> the OpenID server?
> 

Assuming you have a closed system where the consumers and servers are 
both run by you, perhaps you can adapt your consumer implementation to 
accept a username and turn it into a full URL to do authentication.

That is, if the user enters the username "fred" you could transform it 
into http://fred.example.com/ before doing the OpenID request, thus 
avoiding the need to enter a URL.

If you want to support both at once, you could just have a single box 
and only do the above transform if what the user enters looks like a 
username rather than a URL. (For example, if it's entirely alpha-numeric.)