Some implementations don't process the HEAD element correctly

Wed Aug 26 12:20:09 UTC 2009

Hi

Right now I'm playing around with OpenID delegation.

I stumbled upon several OpenID accepting web sites, among them stackoverflow.com
and http://www.openidenabled.com/resources/openid-test/ that don't accept my
delegation.

Which is perfectly fine, as far as I can see.

Let's get to the point. I have this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<HTML lang="de">
<HEAD>
<META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>Test OpenID delegation</TITLE>
<LINK rel="openid.server" href="http://www.clavid.com/provider/openid">
<LINK rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.clavid.com/provider/openid">
<LINK rel="openid.delegate" href="http://thomashuehn.clavid.com">
<LINK rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://thomashuehn.clavid.com">
<P>Nothing to see...

Do you see the HEAD element? Well, I do. Because both the start tag and the end
tag for the HEAD element are *optional*.

When I insert "<HEAD>" (the start tag suffices) they accept this delegation.

Still, obviously quite a few implementations out there insist on grepping the
HTML source for the HEAD tag. Instead of just grepping for the LINK element.

Maybe the spec should carry an informative note to implementors to point out
that the HEAD element does not necessarily have any textual representation in
the HTML source?

Comments?

Thomas