Valentine's one day early

I'm not sure what it is about Valentine's Day and Virginia but this is the second year in a row.

More on Email to URL discovery

Just a couple more thoughts on this topic.

1. I believe that the mapping from email domain to XRDS URL should include some addition pattern to make deployments easier. Deploying a servlet or other mechanism on the root email domain is not always easy. Having a different pattern such as xrds.my-email-service.domain would simplify deployment issues.
2. While it is nice that an email to URL mapping service can provide user-centric identifier management, I don't know how much it will be used by the general public. Discovering that the email provider is also an OpenID 2.0 provider would be enough to start a directed identity flow. This I believe would be more convenient for most users.

Email to URL discovery

In the ongoing "world" of IdP discovery a new proposal has been made by Brad Fitzpatrick on his blog. This proposal provides for a direct mapping between an email address and a personal URL (e.g. an OpenID). The mapping between the email address and personal URL is provided by an email2url_mapping service run by the email provider. Discovery of the email2url_mapping service endpoint is found via XRI URL resolution on the domain of the email address.

Whether the user needs the full indirection capability to have an arbitrary mapping between email address and URL or is fine with allowing the email provider to be their OP/IdP is yet to be seen. It is encouraging to see consumer's UX needs being addressed.