[OpenID] OpenID and the DNS

[Dave CROCKER]

Santosh Rajan wrote:
> PS: Please don't argue about "politics" and "DNS". OpenID should be 
> independant of DNS. here are some examples. 
> 1) My OpenID http://santosh.in
> 2) somebody elses OpenID http://example.jp
> 3) another example http://example.com/joe
> In all the cases above you can see that we are politically independent 
> yet technologically exactly the same.


Note that all of the examples include a portion that is a domain name, and that 
domain names are tied to the DNS.  That makes OpenIDs dependent on the DNS, at 
least for some part of name uniqueness and possibly for name querying.

Generally, reference to the DNS should distinguish between administration of the 
name space -- that is, registration -- versus using the name to map to one or 
more other bits of information -- that is, querying.

The first is required, but the second might not be.  If you only need to 
guarantee unique naming, then the registration mechanism is sufficient.  And if 
you need to do querying, there well might be scenarios that could use a 
different query mechanism than the global DNS.

However note that any requirement for a parallel global query service represents 
an gigantic barrier to adoption.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net