Re: OpenID

On 7 Aug 2008, at 17:05, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>
>> No.  I couldn't care less.  XRDS seriously screwed up in defining  
>> XRI.
>> OpenID could have been deployed far more effectively if it had simply
>> reused existing information systems directly instead of inventing a
>> duplication of DNS using HTTP and making an incomprehensible mess of
>> its documentation as a result.
>
> On a tangent, OpenID seems to be dying on the vine, like similar  
> systems before it. Is it worth creating yet another federated, open,  
> single sign-on system and doing it right, or are there business  
> reasons why the market just doesn't want this? Would solving the  
> technical problems lead to broader adoption or not?
>
> (I'm currently deep in a project that depends on this sort of stuff,  
> so this is of more than theoretical interest.)

In my opinion the great part of OpenId is the idea of using URLs to  
identify people. This is resource oriented architeture at its best.

I believe the attribute exchange part is a useful as a stepping stone  
to something better and more RESTful. Oddly, it is quite easy to get  
this right, by having the openid page point to, or be the foaf page.  
This piece is easy to understand and I wrote it up here:

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_openid

Getting access control is not a far stretch from that. It could be  
done using well known technologies such as SSL. More here

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_creating_a_global

I am working on an implementation of this last one, if it is of  
interest.

	Henry


> -- 
> Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
> Refactoring HTML Just Published!
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/ 
> cafeaulaitA