Directed Identity and the '#' symbol

[Santosh Rajan]

Since we are on the subject of url's as id's. Here is something that has
puzzled me. I hope somebody can shed some light on this.

If I were a average user here is the order of preference i would have liked
for an OpenID. I am sure most people will agree with me.
1) Santosh Rajan
2) santosh.rajan
3) santosh.rajan.myopenid.com
4) http://santosh.rajan.myopenid.com
5) http://myopenid.com/santoshrajan

Now (1) and (2) are not practical so we will eliminate that. (3) is the best
option as I see it. I know you will say that there is no difference between
(3) and (4). But if you are an average user it makes a huge difference.
Because (3) looks more like a name, while (4) looks like a location.

So the puzzle is why wasn't (3) chosen as the Openid instead of (4) and (5)
?

SitG Admin wrote:
> 
> I thought the idea with generation fragments was that the user would 
> enter 'site.net/myname' and the OP would use Directed Identity to 
> turn that into 'site.net/myname#2' (for the second user to have that 
> name), not that the user would enter said generation fragments 
> themself. That said, I just experimented with appending '#generation' 
> manually, and confirmed that this was treated as a different URI 
> (which was only to be expected, since the specs permit any string 
> that would be a legal URL).
> 
> I was *hoping* to find a character that would be ignored ('#' seemed 
> most likely, since Directed Identity doesn't rely on it being entered 
> as part of the original URI), one that I could use to parse out 
> additional parameters such as '#SecretAccessCode0123' and '#WML' - 
> these would be stored on my server's side, then used as preferences 
> when the user returned. But since it's conceivable that a user might 
> have an actual URI ending in (for example) '#WML', *removing* these 
> from the input before my RP decides to treat the whole string as a 
> URI and performs discovery on it, may inadvertently mangle the user's 
> URI.
> 
> I'm inclined to go ahead with this method for now, since I doubt many 
> users *will* have a URI like that, and I doubt many users will be 
> browsing the site where this is implemented in any case (so it's not 
> like I'll be giving millions of users the wrong idea about permitted 
> characters). But if any of you currently planning future updates to 
> the specs have a better idea for what character to use as a 
> delimiter, I'd love to hear it :)
> 
> -Shade
> _______________________________________________
> specs mailing list
> specs at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/specs
> 
> 


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Santosh Rajan
http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com 
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