So, let's walk through the actual use cases.
AIUI, you're saying that Joe will want to use
vanity-domain.com/joe
as his identifier, even though
http://www.vanity-domain.com/joe
is the correct one?
If so, a few thoughts;
1) These days, it's much more likely that the domain will actually be
http://joe.vanity-domain.com/
so I can't help but feel that this argument is something of a straw-man.
2) Even putting that aside, if Joe puts
vanity-domain.com/joe
into his browser bar, he'll get
http://www.vanity-domain.com/joe
thanks to the automated action of the browser; he can (and probably
will anyway) cut-and-paste that string.
3) Even putting that aside, he can easily learn
http://www.vanity-domain.com/joe
or his software can for him.
4) ...and if he doesn't like that, he can move to another provider
which does provide better access (market economies and all that).
5) Even putting that aside, if the browsers are deciding to cowboy it
up and automagically munge URLs in browser bars (probably in non-
compatible ways, BTW), why does this need to be codified in a
standard? Why not just let them do it on their own, like they're doing
now?
Don't get me wrong - if OpenID (for example) wants to specify this
kind of behaviour, or if browsers / providers want to do it on their
own, that's up to them. The problem is when we try to enshrine it in a
*generic* metadata discovery mechanism that potentially will be used
for lots of things.
On 03/12/2008, at 2:53 PM, Breno de Medeiros wrote:
Ah, I see where your confusion is coming from. The average user does
not know that www.vanity-domain.com/bob is a different URL from
vanity-domain.com/bob (or alternatively, that www.vanity-domain.com is
a different location than vanity-domain.com). We can thank all the
major browsers for that.
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 7:45 PM, Breno de Medeiros <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
The 'naked domain' version of the site may not be DNS-resolvable,
while the www. prepended version of the domain may be. In addition,
the fact that a resource URL does not exist (in the sense that it
might return a 404) does not mean that it cannot have meaningful
associated meta-data.
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:40 PM, Mark Nottingham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
On 03/12/2008, at 1:35 PM, Breno de Medeiros wrote:
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Mark Nottingham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] to
be
forwarded
to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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:[EMAIL PROTECTED]; 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/
--
--Breno
+1 (650) 214-1007 desk
+1 (408) 212-0135 (Grand Central)
MTV-41-3 : 383-A
PST (GMT-8) / PDT(GMT-7)
--
--Breno
+1 (650) 214-1007 desk
+1 (408) 212-0135 (Grand Central)
MTV-41-3 : 383-A
PST (GMT-8) / PDT(GMT-7)
--
Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
