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[webfinger] Simplifying and unjamming WebFinger

Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> Fri, 14 June 2013 17:16 UTC

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From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
To: "webfinger@ietf.org" <webfinger@ietf.org>
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Subject: [webfinger] Simplifying and unjamming WebFinger
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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

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