[OpenID] SREG 1.x attributes

[Peter Williams]

There will be market for ax to ldap gateways, then. Which is fine. The purpose of standards is to make markets!

Ldap is now mature, in replication, administration, schemas, extensibility, auth, tls - being ( as intended ) a "simpler" acess protocol than the one iso defined (dap). If ax via sreg wants to be a "yet simpler" access protocol, that's fine: x500 intended that there be n protocols for access, each one tuned to each market, by profiling. Not everyone needs to run a 4 agency directory at the sophistication of dod. And, part of the x500 info model specifically allows for attribute renaming, typically known as virtual directories in marketing. Ax can be one (or more!) such virtual schemas that rewrites attributes names and values, on the fly: much as saml rewrites ldap attributes.

The point is - names and values and bit formats aside - one cannot wait for ax servers to mature- doing all the things an service provider needs from the data model... other than merely re-formatting fields output via some access protocol.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Recordon <drecordon at sixapart.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 1:29 PM
To: Peter Williams <pwilliams at rapattoni.com>; Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.) <eddy_nigg at startcom.org>; general at openid.net >> general at openid.net <general at openid.net>
Subject: Re: [OpenID] SREG 1.x attributes


I think it's far more of a timing thing.  SREG has been supported by
the majority of smaller OpenID Providers and thus some Relying
Parties.  The large Providers (AOL and Yahoo!) didn't provide support
for either spec.  Google now supports AX and MySpace is planning to as
well.  AX will overtime become prevalent as more OPs provide data via
it.

This is why I believe that we should fix SREG to work with 2.0 though
focus effort on adoption of AX.

--David

On Nov 30, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Peter Williams wrote:

> I suspect ax is not too popular as it competes with ldap/ldif - and
> has no real reason to exist. The pain of making yet another
> attribute schema (for what?) is high.
>
> Best if one extends sreg - one field that can deliver an lidf
> stream. Ldif is the sytax, and existing ldap schemas can be used.
> Extensibility is then handled within the ldap world.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.) <eddy_nigg at startcom.org>
> Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 1:09 PM
> To: general at openid.net >> general at openid.net <general at openid.net>
> Subject: Re: [OpenID] SREG 1.x attributes
>
> On 11/30/2008 12:39 AM, Martin Atkins:
> Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.) wrote:
>
> Which is probably because AX was supposed to take care of it. However
> SREG is widely implemented and I agree that we should make it possible
> to easily extend SREG.
>
>
> If you make it possible to extend SREG, what you end up with is AX
> with
> a few predefined attributes baked into the spec and no ability for
> those
> attribute to be updated by third-parties.
>
> I'm not sure anyone actually uses the ability for the attributes to be
> updated by third-parties, so for all intents and purposes you'd just
> be
> reinventing AX as far as I can tell.
>
> Yes, I mentioned that AX is supposed to take care of this.
>
> What do you see as the value of having two parallel specs that both
> have
> the same functionality apart from one having a feature that no-one
> uses?
> (or are you proposing that SREG would replace AX altogether?)
>
> But one might ask, why SREG has become popular (if we can speak
> about popularity in terms of OpenID ;-) ), whereas AX isn't widely
> implemented as far as I can tell. Maybe it's because of the pre-
> defined fields or because of its simplicity, I don't know. But
> something tells me that SREG has been successful, why not extend it
> in some form.
>
>
> Regards
>
> Signer:
> Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd.
> Jabber:
> startcom at startcom.org
> Blog:
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>
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