Subject: How to represent an authenticated identity in an <author> tag

From: "Byrne Reese" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:02:58 -0400

This is a topic that has come up recently in conversations here at Six
Apart that I thought I would share with a broader community to hear your
feedback and thoughts on the subject:

We see a value in representing the following attributes about an author:

* their Display Name (e.g. "Byrne Reese")
* their Email (why anyone would want to publish this an easily parsable
document eludes me, but that is not relevant :)
* their Web URL

The above is accomodated by the current spec, but the following is
something we would also like to represent somehow in a standard way:

* their authenticated identity (e.g. "breese") and the authenticating
authority (e.g. "LiveJournal," "TypeKey," "OpenID," etc.)

This is more important/relevant IMHO to publishing feeds for comments
(in fact I personally would not like to reveal my TypePad, MovableType,
etc username to the outside world for the posts I write), where I
believe knowing the authenticated entity is valuable.

Part of the value I see in supporting this to provide a mechanism for
determining whether a comment was an authenticated comment or not.

Of course, some may think that one's username is considered private and
priveleged information and should not be shared publicly.

Thoughts?

Byrne Reese
Manager, Platform Technology
http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/

---

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:23:05 -0700

> authority (e.g. "LiveJournal," "TypeKey," "OpenID," etc.)

Sounds like an obvious candidate for an exception; why don't you and  
one or two competitors sketch it out and do an I-D?  I'd sure be in  
favor.  -Tim