Re: Fallback flow for /site-meta for top level domains

On 02/12/2008, at 1:25 PM, Dirk Balfanz wrote:
>
> Well, here is the scenario: I buy foobar.com for $3/year at  
> cheapdomains.com. I pay an extra dollar to have "email", which means  
> I tell them where I want my email forwarded. I pick dirk@foobar.com  
> to be forwarded to dirk@gmail.com. I pay another extra dollar per  
> year for "web hosting", which means I get a web interface on  
> cheapdomains.com to create some web pages, which get served on www.foobar.com 
> . I set up a couple of pages there with pictures of my cats or  
> whatever and I am done.
>
> I now also want to use my email address dirk@foobar.com as my OpenID  
> identifier [1] because I heard that that will end my having to  
> create ever-more accounts on the web. I am told that in order to get  
> that to work I need to host a page called "site-meta" on my site  
> with some weird-looking text in it that I don't understand. But,  
> hey, I know how to get that served off www.foobar.com so that's cool.
>
> I have never heard of DNS.
>
> Is that a use case we want to support?
>
> Dirk.
>
> [1] Let's assume that OpenID 3.0 and XRD 2.0 allow that and define  
> some way to discover OpenID endpoints from email addresses.

/site-meta on http://foobar.com/ doesn't (and can't, on its own) make  
any authoritative assertions about mailto:dirk@foobar.com; even though  
the authority is the same, the URI scheme is different.

I know this particular issue is an important one to the OpenID folks,  
but there needs to be a very careful and broad discussion of allowing  
policy and metadata from HTTP to be considered *automatically*  
authoritative for other protocols.

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2008 01:36:07 UTC