Microid mailing list

[Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter AT jabber.org>]

Fred Stutzman wrote:
>>
>> So you'd have the same MicroID at any page at that domain (or subdomain
>> if we figure that part out).
>>
>>>> -          If the URL ends with a directory or path (not a file, i.e.
>>>> http://microid.org/somewhere), make sure it has a trailing slash at
>>>> the end
>>>> (i.e. http://microid.org/somewhere/)
>>
>> See above. Use http://microid.org/
>>
>> That is, I don't think we want per-page claims. At least not in general.
>> Do you have a specific use case where that's important?
> 
> I view per-page claims as absolutely essential - there are lots of
> reasons why I'd want to claim http://del.icio.us/fstutzman and
> http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook separately.  To "boil down" to a
> domain level basis would also not support multiple claims to a
> namespace. We definitely need to keep the system URL-specific so that
> claims can be made on individual URL's.

As I understood things from Jer way back when, the point of a microid is
to form an association between me and you (where the URIs are stand-ins
for those entities). If I am http://saint-andre.com/ (which I own) and I
accept comments (which I don't), then a microid that mashes up that HTTP
URI and your mailto URI (or XMPP URI or whatever) can be used on any
page where you comment at my website.

Things become hazy if you are (say) http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/
(which you seem to be), because you don't own that URI -- it's owned by
blogspot, with the result that your blog is (IMHO) not a full citizen of
the Internet:

http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2006-01.html#2006-01-13T10:07

Fred, you've spent a lot more time thinking about claims than I have,
but to my mind a microid forms an association between me and you. As Jer
once put it, it's like smearing your fingerprint on something of mine.
In the microid context that fingerprint doesn't change because it's a
relation between you and me. I think a page-specific claim is something
that we build on top of microid. Maybe we need something that is a
combination of microid plus a specific resource. So any page at
http://del.icio.us/ could have a microid that associates you with
delicious (forum, testimonial page, whatever) and that microid would
always be the same. I'm still not clear on why, but you might also want
to smear your fingerprint over http://del.icio.us/fstutzman or
http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook in a particular way, to signify
that "this is my facebooky fingerprint".

That said, I also see that there maybe value in integrating microid with
something like OpenID. You might have an OpenID provider (i.e., you
don't host your OpenID at a domain that you own because you're not a
full citizen of the Internet -- most people aren't!). So a microid that
mashes up http://saint-andre.com/ with the URL of your OpenID script
extends OpenID in an interesting way. But that's different from a
per-page microid.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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