MicroID Development

More small fixes to reflect list discussion regarding the scope of applicability for MicroIDs in HTML meta tags and class attributes. Check out the latest version here.

Version 0.2 of the MicroID spec has been published here (mostly minor corrections). Feedback is welcome on the mailing list.

Our documentation guy has written version 0.1 of the MicroID specification and it is available here. Send feedback to the mailing list.

I’ve created a mailing list for the MicroID community.  The address is , and you can subscribe to the list at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/microid.  This list will be open, and the archives will be public.  If you’re interested in MicroID, want to keep up with the spec, or want to connect with other folks implementing MicroID, this list will be useful to you.

In other news, I’ll be hanging out in the #microid channel on irc.freenode.net.  If you’re interested in chatting about MicroID or have quick questions, you may be able to find people in the channel.

There are two important things that I’d like to get feedback on for the actual mechanics of MicroID.

First, Ben Laurie pointed out an obvious “why didn’t you…” in that we should be using HMAC to combine the two hashed identifiers. So, unless there are any objections, I’ll be updating the spec soon to use HMAC (it seems to be as widely available as sha1 alone).

Second is a deeper question, should the site or published-at URI be a complete one, or just a reference to the authority? Simply put, should it be ‘http://jeremie.com/blog/entry.php?x-y-z’ or just ‘http://jeremie.com/’? The former would require a unique MicroID generated for every URI it’s published at (is this even always known?). The latter would require a better description and common understanding of what the ‘authority’ is for any given URI. What this really comes down to is normalization, for the hashes to match, everyone needs to ensure the URIs are normalized the same.

Suggestions are welcomed here, I’m working on this project for how deeply useful it can be, not because I’m an expert in this area.