[OpenID] Google OpenID IDP is now live

[Martin Atkins]

Steven Livingstone-Perez wrote:
> Still struggling to understand why a language hint at the OP based on 
> the provided OpenID wouldn’t work. I mean, if you registered and set a 
> language when doing so then why not use that even when NOT logged in? 
> Only the OP needs to know right?
> 

I'm not sure what exactly you're proposing at the technical level, but I 
can think of two ways to achieve what you're describing:

  * The OP sets a cookie for the user's primary language which persists 
when signed out. This would of course fail if the user is not on a 
computer he's logged in with before, which is unfortunately also the 
most likely case where Accept-Language and similar techniques will fail, 
since the user is most probably not using his own computer and may thus 
be using someone else's settings.

  * The OP looks at openid.identity in the request and picks a language 
based on that. This doesn't work in the directed identity case, where 
the user just enters the OP identifier rather than his own identifier. 
It could also be considered a privacy issue if anyone can discover a 
user's primary language given their OpenID identifier by simply 
initiating OpenID Authentication and seeing what language is returned at 
the OP.

Did you have something else in mind?