On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Martin Atkins <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mart@degeneration.co.uk">mart@degeneration.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
David Fuelling wrote:<br>
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This line of reasoning doesn't make sense if you're thinking of an email address as a "1st-Class" OpenID. However, if your OpenID is really an XRI or URL (only), then your email address becomes a surrogate for your OpenID, or a pointer. That's why email addresses are a special case -- today they're not really OpenID's, so if we're going to start using them "like" openId's, then we need to add a lot of flexibility into the mechanism so that (at a domain owner's discretion, and the discretion of user controling a particular email address in that domain) any particular email address can be a surrogate for any of that user's OpenIDs.<br>
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Besides, with OpenID 2.0, I can use a particular URL (e.g., <a href="http://openid.sappenin.com/david" target="_blank">http://openid.sappenin.com/david</a>) but it really "maps" to my acutal OpenID (<a href="http://sappenin.myopenid.com" target="_blank">http://sappenin.myopenid.com</a> <<a href="http://sappenin.myopenid.com/" target="_blank">http://sappenin.myopenid.com/</a>>). It seems odd that so many people are arguing to take away this feature of OpenIDs when it comes to email addresses.<br>
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In the delegation case, the URL you enter is still the claimed_identifier. Using the email address as the claimed identifier -- which can optionally delegate to another identifier -- is in fact *more* consistent with OpenID delegation as it exists today. And that is, in fact, what <a href="mailto:mart@degeneration.co.uk" target="_blank">mart@degeneration.co.uk</a> is currently configured to do, per my DNS proposal.<br>
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I think it's important to avoid changing the model when we go over to email addresses. Email addresses are just another URL scheme.<br>
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While OpenID does have some limitations, we should solve them on a broader level so that they apply to all identifier types, and keep the core protocol and model the same regardless of what URL scheme your identifier happens to use.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>The problem with using the mailto: schemed identifier as the "claimed_identifier" is that it is not "commonly resolvable" in the same way that a URL is. It requires a "mapping scheme" (like EAUT) or some other translation mechanism (DNS lookup?), which isn't built into common software like the web-browser, my blackberry, my iPhone, my Tivo, the space shuttle, etc. <br>
<br>Firefox aside, I think it will be an uphill battle to try to get a mailto: schemed identifier to be supported on all the various platforms out there. We should be sticking to URLs as identifiers, which is why mapping the email address to a URL seems like a better plan than using the mailto: scheme as a new form of OpenID Identifier. <br>
<br>I know there are good arguements for/against -- this is a years-old debate....but I think it's essentially what we're disagreeing about -- should the email address be the OpenID, or should it just map to an OpenID.<br>
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