[OpenID] HTML-Based Discovery incompatibilities

[Martin Atkins]

Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:
> 
> If I will have any influence on future RP adoption, I will do my best to
> make them ignore HTML discovery completely. After all, in OpenID, it doesn't
> seem to matter what the spec says anyway (unfortunately).
> 

Are there any protocols where this is not the case?

There are bad implementations of every specification. The choice we need 
to make as specification authors is whether to pretend all 
specifications are perfect and continue adding more and more 
requirements, or to instead write a specification that describes current 
implementation practice.

I think in most cases specifications should be driven by 
implementations, rather than the other way around. A specification that 
describes something that doesn't work in practice is of no use to 
anyone, and writing new specs with even more stringent requirements 
doesn't automatically fix all of the existing "broken" implementations.