Re: [apps-discuss] Looking at Webfinger

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2012-07-03 07:47, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> I've pretty much ignored the whole webfinger / acct: / SWD discussion (too much!). However, since it's apparent it may soon become Real, I had a look.
>
> In a nutshell, my initial reaction is "It's Not Nearly As Bad As I Thought It Would Be." :)
>
> With that in mind, a few questions / comments (I'll resist going into editorial matters, for the time being):
>
> * First and foremost, why use host-meta? What value does adding this extra step to the dance bring, beyond "We've defined it, therefore we must use it?"
>
> As I think I've said many times before, the whole point of a .well-known URI is to group like uses together, to avoid having a "dictionary" resource that gets bloated with many application's unrelated data, thereby overburdening clients with too much information (especially when they're constrained, e.g., mobile).
>
> As such, host-meta is a spectacularly bad example of a well-known URI. Defining a end-all-be-all well-known-URI kind of removes the point of having a registry, after all...
>
> Instead, why not just define a NEW well-known URI for user data? That has a more constrained scope, and saves one round trip (or more). E.g.,
>
> GET /.well-known/webfinger?user=bob%40example.com HTTP/1.0
> Host: example.com
> ...

Or even

   /.well-known/webfinger/[e-mail]

?

Best regards, Julian