This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: The case for stating OpenIDs as complete URLs Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

OpenID will have to co-exist with regular user names and passwords for some time to come in most cases. So as developers we have to come up with good conventions on how to deal with this duality. To do that, it would help greatly if we were able to distinguish an OpenID from a regular user name.

Consider this flow:

With OpenID distinguishable from regular user names, you don't have to use an additional field to complicate the login or signup screen further.

It seems that there is already some support for the notion of specifying OpenIDs as complete URLs and not just their host names. Both Zoomr and Jyte explicitly encourage/require usage of complete URLs:

But there are definitely other cases where just the host name is used. So neither approach seems to have taken hold as a defacto standard. I'd recommend that we move in the direction of full URLs. And if your site only takes OpenID, then you could still reinforce that idea by having login be something like http:// [input field].