[OpenID] host-meta and "acct:"

[Santosh Rajan]

http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-hammer-hostmeta-01.txt

If you have read the spec above, you will wonder where did the "acct:"
scheme come from. It came from webfinger. The host-meta spec has been
work in progress for a while now. Its predecessor was the "site-meta"
spec. The idea of webfinger came later, in may 2009,and the idea of
"acct:" about two months back. Given that webfinger is to follow
host-meta, the question is "How come host-meta is following
webfinger?".

Think about it. There is an obvious attempt to legitimize the "acct:"
scheme here. That is not a bad idea. I like it actually. Consider
this. If I type "acct:santrajan at gmail.com
<acct%3Asantrajan at gmail.com>" into my browser location bar, my browser
would retrieve my XRD. Now this is an extreme example. But I hope you
get the idea. If not please ask me.

Unfortunately I have a problem with this idea, even though I like it,
this is not the way to do it. The problem is that if you want to
legitimize "acct:" you need to be a software engineer contortionist.
You need to "Reject" Subject from the host-meta, and you need to add
"Scope" into the host-meta.

My contention is that if you really want to this, (and I like the
idea), let us get all the DNS, w3c folk on board and do it. Doing it
via the "backdoor" is going to cause more harm to the "identity
movement" than good.


-- 
http://hi.im/santosh
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