On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 09:38 -0700, Will Norris wrote: > Regardless of what specific spec addition we're talking about, I don't > think the technical difficulty to implement it should ever be a > determining factor in weighing the merit of the proposal.
I disagree here. We don't write specs just so people can appreciate the abstract beauty of the models we describe. We write specs so we can have working code solving problems. No specification should be considered complete without at least one reference implementation, and the complexity of implementation should be taken as feedback to the developing specification. The more complexity is required, the more expensive it is to implement and test the specification, which directly impacts adoption. And the more error-prone the implementations will be, hampering interoperability. I think this idea is fairly central to OpenID. As others have pointed out time and time again, there are other systems that have pretty much all the same properties as OpenID does, they may cover them in a more rigorous fashion, they may have been around for years or decades, but they don't have the appeal that OpenID does today. I believe that is because they were perceived as too inaccessible, or too expensive to implement or integrate. I'm not saying that Noah's proposed change is in any way impossible to implement, but as a member of a team which maintains three OpenID implementations, the cost is going to be a factor for me. Most (if not all) of the editors of the OpenID specification(s) to date have been directly involved in implementation, and I doubt I am alone in this. (And yes, I do recognize that I have, in the past, argued in favor of things that were a lot more complex than this. It's one factor among many.) - Kevin _______________________________________________ specs mailing list specs@openid.net http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/specs