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Re: [webfinger] Simplifying and unjamming WebFinger

Eric Mill <konklone@gmail.com> Fri, 14 June 2013 17:34 UTC

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From: Eric Mill <konklone@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:34:01 -0400
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To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
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Subject: Re: [webfinger] Simplifying and unjamming WebFinger
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A thousand times yes. Webfinger is the small beautiful idea that could, and
this endless back-and-forth is sucking the life out of it.

I haven't been involved in the spec work, but I did do some actual
evangelism <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y26c9MNQLyc> to the Rails
community soon after Webfinger began - *3 years ago*. But that's all I did
- once the spec slowed down to a crawl and got lost in the weeds, I
couldn't sustain that energy. I'm sure I'm not the only one to be affected
that way.

email -> metadata. Make it possible to own your identity with your email.
That's what we need.

-- Eric


On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 1:16 PM, 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
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> webfinger mailing list
> webfinger@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/webfinger
>
>


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