[OpenID] OpenID based on email addresses... Just Works!

[David Fuelling]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Martin Atkins <martin at atkins.me.uk> wrote:

> David Fuelling wrote:
>
>>
>> The problem with using the mailto: schemed identifier as the
>> "claimed_identifier" is that it is not "commonly resolvable" in the same way
>> that a URL is.  It requires a "mapping scheme" (like EAUT) or some other
>> translation mechanism (DNS lookup?), which isn't built into common software
>> like the web-browser, my blackberry, my iPhone, my Tivo, the space shuttle,
>> etc.
>> Firefox aside, I think it will be an uphill battle to try to get a mailto:schemed identifier to be supported on all the various platforms out there.
>>  We should be sticking to URLs as identifiers, which is why mapping the
>> email address to a URL seems like a better plan than using the mailto:scheme as a new form of OpenID Identifier.
>> I know there are good arguements for/against -- this is a years-old
>> debate....but I think it's essentially what we're disagreeing about --
>> should the email address be the OpenID, or should it just map to an OpenID.
>>
>>
> What's the use case for being able to "resolve" OpenID identifiers in web
> browsers?
>
> Most identifiers today don't give you anything useful in the web browser
> context. Microsoft's are blank, may just say "This is an OpenID
> identifier"...
>
>
That's not what I mean.  Instead, I'm talking about any particular device's
ability to "do something" with an OpenID URL.  For example, most "devices"
(be it Tivo, iPhone, Blackberry, etc) already have some sort of support for
a URL (I could be way off here, but I think this is accurate).  My thinking
is that it should be easier to allow my Blackberry to support OpenID since
it's just a URL, and arguably my Blackberry can already "do stuff" with a
URL -- it already has a library that can talk HTTP to an endpoint based on
the URL.  So, adding openid to my blackberry is actually more "easy" (pardon
my grammar) with URLs -- the resolvability is of an URL is already built-in
to a lot of devices.

However, most of these devices don't natively know how to "resolve" a
mailto: link into a URL.    It would require extra device-native software.
My point really centers around the assumption that since many devices can
already natively handle URL's (in the sense that they can resolve them using
HTTP) then OpenID should be easier to implement on these devices if an
OpenID is a URL.  Trying to get all these devices to support a new form of
"link", as it were in the form of a mailto: would seem to be more difficult,
if I'm thinking pragmatically.
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