[OpenID] HTML-Based Discovery incompatibilities

[Chris Messina]

I just read over SS 7.3.3 on HTML-Based Discovery [1], and considering my
experience today trying to re-delegate my OpenID, I've discovered that this
section needs to updated a clarified.

It turns out that relying parties are not parsing HTML rel values in a
standard way. That is, if there is more than one rel value provided for a
link, some RPs fail, whereas others work fine.

In other words, this:

   <link rel="openid2.provider openid.server" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/" />
   <link rel="openid2.local_id openid.delegate" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/" />

is not the same as this:

   <link rel="openid2.provider" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/?openid_server=1" />
   <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/author/factoryjoe/" />
   <link rel="openid.server" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/?openid_server=1" />
   <link rel="openid.delegate" href="
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/author/factoryjoe/" />

It's my understanding that the rel attribute should be able to contain
several values.
But I can tell you that IntenseDebate, for example, failed when delegation
was setup using the former code. It only worked when I broke out the two
links into four.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with the libraries or what, but I'd like to
know if other people have experienced this problem, and if we can improve
the language in the spec to make sure that people understand that they need
to look for the presence of an element in a rel value -- not that the
*entire* value is one element.

Chris

[1] http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0.html#html_disco

-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
 Open Web Advocate-at-Large

factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
This email is:   [ ] bloggable    [X] ask first   [ ] private
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-general/attachments/20090108/6fb7cd53/attachment-0002.htm>