Yadis

Yadis is a for discovery of services such as OpenID, OAuth, and XDI connected to a Yadis ID. While intended to discover digital identity services, Yadis is not restricted to those. Other services can easily be included.

A Yadis ID can either be a traditional URL or a newer XRI i-name, where the i-name must resolve to a URL. The so-called Yadis URL either equals the Yadis ID (if this is a URL) or the resolved URL of the XRI i-name.

Furthermore, Yadis specifies how to use the Yadis URL to retrieve a service descriptor called Yadis Resource Descriptor. This descriptor follows the XRDS format and connects several services, like authentication or authorization to the Yadis URL. Each service description can have further parameters.

Yadis follows the REST-ful, "small pieces loosely joined" paradigm that has proven to be successful in the development of the web.

The basic assumption is that identities can be addressed with URLs or with other identifiers (such as XRI i-names) that can be resolved to URLs. Yadis then associates an XRDS document (an XML-based capability file) with each URL that expresses the associated capabilities or services.

The owner of a Yadis identifier can choose which services he wishes to use in his XRDS document. After retrieving this document, a relying party such as a website accepting Yadis identifiers can select an appropriate services of the XRDS document, e.g. a protocol to use for authentication. This can allow existing web sites, like blogs, to easily implement basic Yadis functionality (for instance, redirecting users who arrive at a blog to relevant information about the person the blog belongs to) while also making it possible to build more advanced applications (for example, allowing complex queries of a site-owner's information to be submitted directly to the Yadis site).

The capability document associated with an identity URL is found either:

Developers can choose which of the alternatives to implement, based on factors such as whether they can run software at the identity URL or not.

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