[OpenID] About Email Addresses and OpenID

[SitG Admin]

>Three of them are email providers and your OpenID is tied to your email
>address. ie Opening and account at one of them gives you an email address
>and an OpenID. You can also create a Google account with a non Google email
>address. Again the OpenID is tied to an email address. So when you are
>logging in with any of these OpenID's you are in effect logging in with an
>email account.

And if Google (or any of the other providers) were to suddenly allow 
users to log in with something *other* than an E-mail address?

>And why doesn't OpenID support Email addresses as OpenID's? Given the facts
>above I cant think of a reason. Can you?

Would it prove anything either way?

Consider: you provide information and then challenge anyone to reach 
a different conclusion given ONLY the information you just provided. 
Stacking the deck, much?

Also: you assert that the information you provided is factual. I 
believe that you *want* it to be factual, but your logic is so 
tenuous that I have trouble seeing the information as even being 
*plausible*.

If the major providers were to suddenly switch over to having users 
log in with their street address, would that mean that 99% of all 
OpenID's in the wild were really street addresses masquerading as 
OpenID's? This *is* what your logic implies.

But really, the E-mail address is like any other local (to an OP) 
identifier; it NEED NOT be disclosed to any other party, nor have any 
relationship to how the OP identifies users to others. For namespace 
reasons public identifiers have usually been reserved for users who 
use the same name when logging in to their account; but this is 
because users generally find it easier to remember *names* than 
*numbers*. The domain name system worked splendidly for the same 
reason: users found it easier to remember "apple.com" than a dotted 
quad. And, of course, for sites that don't want to reveal how many 
users they have ("Welcome, user #59812."), the name could be used 
*exclusively* with the express purpose of HIDING the underlying 
mechanics of anything but a name!

-Shade