Re: [webfinger] Simplifying and unjamming WebFinger

On 14 June 2013 19:16, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:

> I’ve been following the endless back and forth on this with a feeling of
> despair... people seem to be talking back and forth past each other.  Lots
> of people think there are problems, Paul thinks there are no problems.
>
> Back in the day, when I first heard of WebFinger, it was the simplest
> thing imaginable: Put in an email address and get back some pointers to
> IDPs or whatever.  Somewhere along the way, it morphed into getting
> metadata about any Resource.  Which meant that you couldn’t just use an
> email address, you had to turn it into a URI.
>
> And thus the problem in the spec.  You have to figure out which URI scheme
> to use (acct:, mailto:, device:) and this will affect the output in ways
> that have to be specified in Other Places.
>
> But I don’t have a general-purpose problem about wanting metadata for
> arbitrary URIs.  I have several immediate pressing problems for retrieving
> metadata about  email addresses.   The former is now seriously getting in
> the way of the latter.
>
> So, how about a WebFinger light, in which the form of the query is
>
> /.well-known/wf-lite?email=bob@example.com
>

IMHO webfinger light would be:

/.well-known/acct/bob

The server MUST return JRD, but MAY return other representations.

>
> Which yields a JRD.  You could still have the rel-selection and so on. It
> would be easy to understand. It would be self-contained. The draft would
> shrink in size dramatically. It would be instantly usable by OpenID
> Connect.  It would probably sail through the IESG.
>
>
>  -T
>
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