OpenID delegation and XFN

I contacted the FreeYourID folks earlier this week to ask them about adding an XFN link to my forwarding page at will.norris.name. They seemed receptive to the idea and should hopefully be adding that soon. I was then telling Chris Messina about it and I think he misunderstood me, but in the process got me thinking. You see, FreeYourID does delegate OpenIDs off to MyOpenID, but the openid.delegate is the same as your FreeYourID URL. In addition to this, they have a meta refresh tag to forward web traffic to a site of your choosing (claimID in my case). I was asking for a rel="me" link for this forwarded URL be added.

But what about OpenID delegate URLs? Is there ever a case when it does not make sense to add rel="me" to an OpenID delegate? I can’t imagine that there is, since the very act of delegating is saying “this is my ID over at this other service”. With that in mind, I propose that openid delegates always include rel="me" in addition to rel="openid.delegate". Rel is a space delimited multi-valued attribute, and I’ve successfully tested a couple of different services. Here’s a concrete example of my OpenID delegation links here on willnorris.com…

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate me" href="http://will.norris.name/" />

I will be updating my yadis plugin to behave in this manner as well.