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

On 03/12/2008, at 1:35 PM, Breno de Medeiros wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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.
>
> The email address is a distraction here. The core issue is  
> independent of that.
>
> vanity-example.com (hosted only at www.vanity-example.com) is a small
> site and wants to enable all their user URLs
> www.vanity-example.com/bob, www.vanity-example.com/alice to be useful
> as discovery endpoints for user services. Thankfully some other site,
> more professionally managed, is willing to provide discovery services,
> aggregation, etc., on behalf of the users of these vanity domains.

You just lost me. Why is it important to have site metadata for a site  
that doesn't exist, if the e-mail issue is a distraction?

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

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2008 02:40:55 UTC