[OpenID] HTML-Based Discovery incompatibilities

[Chris Messina]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran at hueniverse.com>wrote:

> Long rant inline. Nothing important so if you are busy feel free to ignore.
>
...

>
> If <link> elements are a critical part of the OpenID solutions for the
> reasons you offer, OpenID is doomed.
>

I'm not going to dispute your arguments line by line. It comes down to
elitism and populism.
While beautiful fucking snowflakes are exactly that, when the dog pisses on
them, they all the same.

And that's why the web is a cesspool of poorly formed HTML, Javascript and
CSS, the majority of which does not validate and never will.

I'm quite sure that there is an immaculate web out there of perfectly formed
XML, and there are about five people that use it religiously, and their
world is perfect, and complete, and ignored by everyone who has more
important things to do than comply with the minutia of the specs that people
like us spec our time writing. They'll tweak and they'll tweak until it runs
because it's their job, not because they're scientists or because they care
about technology because at the end of the day, something needs to ship for
them to take home a paycheck.

And when some boss person finally decides that he wants an OpenID and the
lowly intern who just read the HTML4 book last week is assigned the task,
I'm can imagine that being able to add a simple <link> delegation tag to the
boss' blog will save him a whole lot of hassle.

It isn't that that will be the dominate use case, but it will be *a* use
case, and many like it are sure to emerge over the course of time between
where we are today and where we aspire to get to.

Now, whether that <link> tags points directly to the delegated OpenID or to
an XRD document, I suppose I could care less. I think that real people deal
better with things that seem more concrete to them, and therefore pointing
to a URL instead of an abstract bundle of services will make more sense...
but if there's someplace that will offer to host your secure XRD profile for
you, and make it stupidly easy to set up, then I don't care if the end
result looks more like this:

<link rel="describedby" href="https://example.com/discovery.xrds" />

than this:

<link rel="openid2.delegate" href="https://example.com" />

(though I imagine the latter will be more comprehensible)

Eran, I don't doubt your technical capabilities or prowess. But when it
comes to promoting technology or ideas, and getting this stuff effectively
in the hands of regular people who just see "snow" when we show them our
proverbial beautiful fucking snowflakes, I think I've got enough experience
to advocate from an informed position here.

Chris

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

factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
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