Re: [apps-discuss] Webfinger: acct "link relation"

["Paul E. Jones" <[e-mail]>]

Michael,

 

I would hope that virtually every piece of information stored in a user's
profile is editable, though I can imagine some information may not be.  In
any case, that largely seems to be an account management user interface
issue.  Are you suggesting a change in the Webfinger protocol?

 

Paul

 

From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On
Behalf Of Michiel de Jong
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 2:57 AM
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Webfinger: acct "link relation"

 

one very nice application of that would be to facilitate implementation of
user-editable webfinger. There will be resources that an identity provider
wants to announce by default for all their users, but maybe some (power)
users want to announce some additional machine-readable pointers related to
their user address. Separating user-provided links from provider-provided :)
might make a lot of sense where you don't want the provider-provided stuff
to break. In case of conflict i think the 'seealso' one should always lose.
That way, you can give your users the freedom to paste whatever links they
want into their profile settings, without fear of that breaking your
service's well-tested federation features.

user-editable webfinger would be an amazing feature, and whereas in theory
you could offer it already, allowing users to paste stuff into the bowels of
your service's federation mechanism feels just wrong, adding a seealso link
to a section on the user's profile page, where the user already has things
like a bio, interests, location, etcetera, feels a lot more right. i guess
it's a software architecture consideration.



On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:56 AM, Paul E. Jones <[e-mail]>
wrote:

Folks,

 

In the latest Webfinger draft, we introduced a "acct" link relation named
"acct" (see Section 6).  The intent with that link relation was to allow for
one to inform a webfinger client that a user's account information may be
retrieved elsewhere.  I believe this will be important, since a user might
have more than one account and this might serve as a means of associating
them.  Certainly, it would be a way of retrieving information from those
other accounts automatically.

 

Perhaps calling the new link relation "acct" is too restrictive, though.  If
one used Webfinger to query other kinds of information other than a user's
account, there may still be a need/desire to refer the Webfinger client to
other resources.

 

What do you think about changing this section such that the link relation is
renamed to "seealso"?  This would still be useful when querying an acct URI,
but would also be useful when querying any URI since it  is more generic.

 

Do note that "seealso" would be different than the "alternate" link
relation.  It would not refer to alternative information, but would refer to
supplemental information.  In practice, the supplemental information may be
the more informative since the bulk of the information related to a user
might be held under a different account.

 

Your thoughts?

 

Paul