Re: avatar.js

Thanks for the reply Melvin, I wonder why my original post to the webfinger 
google group does not appear, even though I'm subscribed. 
Comments below...

On Wednesday, November 21, 2012 2:33:56 PM UTC+1, melvincarvalho wrote:
>
> On 21 November 2012 11:25, Nick Jennings <ni...@silverbucket.net<javascript:>
> > wrote:
>
>> Hello All, 
>>
>>  This is my first time posting to both the fedsocweb and webfinger lists. 
>> My name is Nick Jennings and I'm a long-time open-source hacker, though 
>> until recently I haven't been very active in the problem domain of the open 
>> social web. Michiel de Jong and I have been working on a simple avatar.js 
>> library which takes an email address, and uses WebFinger to query the host 
>> portion and return the avatar URL, if found. 
>>
>>  It currently uses the /.well-known/host-meta.json endpoint as it's 
>> starting default, then falls back to host-meta (if not found). Likewise 
>> with HTTPS falling back to HTTP. I see there is a WebFinger draft 3 in 
>> progress which will change the endpoint to /.well-known/webfinger, so I'll 
>> update that as the default soon, with a fallback to host-meta*. Of course, 
>> the server will need to support CORS since this is a pure JavaScript 
>> browser client library, so it doesn't work with gmail.com email 
>> addresses.
>>
>
> First of all great work!  The demo is simple and intuitive, it's great you 
> can see the results right away.
>

Thanks! There's still a lot of work to do to make it behave well in all the 
fringe cases, like timeouts etc. but it's a start.
 

One thing that we do sometimes is fall back to a CORS proxy when the remote 
> server does not offer CORS.  I'm surprised gmail does not.  
>
 

>
> Any plans to support other identifiers that have an avatar such as http?  
> Then you can get avatars from indieweb users, facebook, tent.io etc. too 
> ...
>


Yeah, the long term plan is to handle a lot of different open protocols and 
projects using the 'polyglot' approach. So these different implementations 
would be supported either on the client side or via a server-side proxy 
(using WebSockets and/or a REST API in some cases). 

Cheers
Nick