Re: Webfinger

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org> wrote:
>[snip]
>
> WebFinger maps from URIs to things like email and accounts, not the
> other way around.
>
> A new solution to the "discovery" problem is out of scope I'm pretty
> sure. However, we can keep references to WebFinger as informative if
> some folks prefer some other solution. I haven't seen anything deployed
> in this space besides content negotation, which is again, basically
> never actually used for well-known reasons regarding its set-up.
>

Harry, this isn't helpful. I've written several iterations on social
API implementations and Discovery has always been a key element. We
have to be able to discuss it without having someone immediately jump
up and say it's out of scope. The ability to say, "I have this social
identifier and I need to find out more about it" is essential.

Sando said:
>> The indieweb reasons against webfinger are mostly not compelling for me, but a few of them are.    If we're going to use it, I'd think we should update it to be JUST a mapping from email to profile URL.  That is, http://w3.org/.well-known/wf2?email= sandro@w3.org would http redirect to http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro.   And that would be the entirely of the standard, give or take edge cases.
>>

I'd argue against using it (webfinger) and opting for something much
less complicated. The basic idea of starting with an email like
identifier is fine, as is doing a GET to some well-known endpoint, but
the result ought to just be an HTTP redirect back to some fixed point,
just as you describe here.

  GET /.well-known/whois?id=jasnell@gmail.com HTTP/1.1

  HTTP/1.1 302
  Location: http://jasnell.me

- James

Received on Friday, 30 January 2015 21:39:56 UTC