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

[Michiel de Jong <[e-mail]>]

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,****
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> 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.****
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> 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.****
>
> ** **
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> 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.****
>
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> 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****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
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