XRDS

XRDS (eXtensible Resource Descriptor Sequence) is an XML format for discovery of metadata about a web resource – in particular discovery of services associated with the resource, a process known as service discovery. For example, a website offering OpenID login can resolve a user's OpenID identifier to an XRDS document to discover the location of the user's OpenID service provider.

The XML format used by XRDS was originally developed in 2004 by the OASIS XRI (extensible resource identifier) Technical Committee as the resolution format for XRIs. The acronym XRDS was coined during subsequent discussions between XRI TC members and OpenID developers at first Internet Identity Workshop held in Berkeley, CA in October 2005.

The protocol for discovering an XRDS document from a URL was formalized as the Yadis specification published by Yadis.org in March 2006. Yadis became the service discovery format for OpenID 1.1.

A common discovery service for both URLs and XRIs proved so useful that in November 2007 the XRI Resolution 2.0 specification formally added the URL-based method of XRDS discovery (Section 6). This format and discovery protocol subsequently became part of OpenID Authentication 2.0.

In early 2008, work on OAuth discovery by Eran Hammer-Lahav led to the development of XRDS Simple, a profile of XRDS that restricts it to the most basic elements and introduces some extensions to support OAuth discovery and other protocols that use specific HTTP methods. In late 2008, XRDS Simple has been cancelled and merged back into the main XRDS specification resulting in the upcoming XRD 1.0 format.

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