Monday, August 17, 2009

Idiot's guide to Webfinger and .tel

Webfinger:



.tel:

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Riiiiight.

You forgot step 0:

Webfinger: Pay zero dollars. Host your address wherever you feel like (probably the same place as your email address).

.tel: Pay $34/year to some company that can go out of business, and come up with a name in a flat namespace that ends in .tel.

If we do what you suggest in your previous post, then we're in the unenviable position of wasting domain names for a single purpose, unless you really believe that today's internet developers are going to be satisfied parsing TXT records without any kind of structured data.

I agree that WebFinger needs to be as simple as possible, but DNS is *not* the answer here.

rikkles said...

Actually it's more like $1/mo, in many cases less than $10/year.

Second, no one can go out of business: the domain is yours and you switch to any registrar you want. Which just can't be said about email addresses! You'll be dead in the water if your provider dies.

Third, if you consider that using a domain name for your single point of contact/presence online is "wasted", I want to know what you're smoking, it'll make me a billionaire.

Fourth, don't use TXT records, use NAPTR records. And again, if you think a NAPTR structure is more complicated than an XRD structure, I really want to know what you're smoking.

No, webfinger is a horrible convoluted technical solution to a problem that can be solved elegantly with domain names. Is $1/mo worth it for a single point of contact online? That's the only question.

I say YES, whatever domain you're using for this. .tel has additional infrastructure (privacy, etc...) to support that, but any TLD can do.

Eric said...

It's either free, or it's not useful.

Unknown said...

Eric,
Please bring more to the table thna that. I mean, come on...really?