Re: the possible impact of future changes in webfinger (was Re: Anonymity and multiple identities)

On 7 July 2012 18:05, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org>
> wrote:
> > 1 - it must be a scheme that given some sort of human-memorable ASCII
> > string, always produces the same structured data object.
> > 2 - the human-memorable ASCII string should be understood by users to
> > have a one-to-one mapping to online identities
> > 3 - there should be no centralized control on minting these strings,
> > other than DNS which we are sort of bound to already any way, by
> > virtue of being on the web.
> > 4 - the person who operates a specific online identity, or (in case
> > DNS is used) the sysadmin of the domain this online identity belongs
> > to should have control over the contents of said structured data
> > object.
> >
> > So facebook open graph does 1, 2 and 4, but not 3, so it doesn't
> > qualify as an alternative to webfinger.
> > You could use URLs of foaf documents directly or in client-side certs,
> > which would satisfy constraints 2,3 and 4, but not constraint 1.
>
> actually, i should be more specific there - http URLs do, strictly
> speaking, qualify as human-memorable ASCII strings, and can be
> understood to map one-to-one to online identities, but
> http://host/can/be/any/path is simply harder to remember and use than
> user@host. That is why webfinger was invented. So should probably
> mention the option of http-based identity separately. then the options
> are to identify users on fedsocweb by:
>
> - no universal scheme, each silo use its own system (i wouldn't recommend
> this)
> - http URLs (i wouldn't recommend this)
> - xmpp disco (that's an option i would say)
> - webfinger (would be my preference).
>
> Melvin, which one would you think is the best path to a successful
> fedsocweb? do you see more options than these?
>

Tricky to satisfy all four of those points.  And it's also hard to please
everyone.

Mark Nottingham's webfinger suggestion from this week, for user based
discovery, seemed to me, to be the most practical, so far:

example.com/.well-known/user/bob

I was personally able to implement this pattern in under an hour