Warning:
This wiki has been archived and is now read-only.

Webfinger and SWD

From OStatus Community Group
Jump to: navigation, search

This is an analysis of the relative values of Webfinger and SWD for OStatus use.

Webfinger

Webfinger is a mechanism for determining links and properties related to an identity.

It uses the Host-Meta protocol to discover a URI template for an XRD document describing the account.

Pros

  • OStatus 1.0 and below use Webfinger. Multiple implementations, 10s of thousands of sites.
  • Discovery of multiple links and properties can happen in one request. For example: profile data, activity stream feed, pubsubhubbub hub, and salmon endpoint. This saves several discovery hits.
  • Supports both XML and JSON.

Cons

  • JSON version not widely (?) implemented.
  • No formal standards document with IP agreements (?)

Simple Web Discovery

Pros

Cons