[OpenID] W3C TAG recommends against XRI

[David Recordon]

I would have to agree with Simon here.  Examples around the social web  
are also much more clear with URLs where I can sign into Plaxo with an  
OpenID URL, it use the Google Social Graph API to discover I use  
Flickr, and then automatically pull in my photos.

--David

On May 24, 2008, at 1:09 AM, Simon Willison wrote:

> 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
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