[OpenID] W3C TAG recommends against XRI

[Simon Willison]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Andy Powell <andy.powell at eduserv.org.uk> wrote:
> For me, the success of OpenID (and pretty much everything else for that
> matter) is tightly coupled to its fit with the Web Architecture - XRI
> now clearly damages that fit.  On that basis, from a Web architecture
> point of view, I think that the introduction of XRI into the 2.0 spec
> was a mistake and the quicker we recognise that and do something about
> it the better.

I think the larger problem with XRIs is that the vast majority of
developers (smart developers, people who live and breathe HTTP) Just
Don't Get them. I've been evangelising OpenID at conferences and in
private for over a year now, and 95% of the developers I talk to have
never heard of XRIs - and those that have are generally totally
confused as to what they actually are.

Here's a pretty telling example:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/xris_bad_uris_good.html

If Edd Dumbill (ex-managing editor of xml.com and long-running chair
of the XTech conference) can't get his head around XRIs then what hope
for everyone else?

A year ago this didn't bother me so much, because XRIs were still a
relatively new concept to the web development scene at large. The
scary thing is that twelve months later the situation hasn't changed
in the slightest - despite the OpenID 2.0 officially baking in XRI six
months ago, and the popular OpenID libraries supporting XRIs for
significantly longer than that.

I still haven't seen an explanation of XRIs that makes sense to even
super-experienced web developers. Without that, I just don't see the
XRI ever taking off - and in fact I see it harming OpenID 2.0 as
developers are put off the technology by the fact that they don't
understand its dependencies.

Simon Willison