I like webfinger for a couple/few reasons:
1. It reminds me of finger - which was cool. Sort of an old school twitter/blog before the web.
2. It got me using OpenID again, which I've had an account for forever but:
- I could never remember which browser I installed the certificate in.
- I could never remember the URL.
3. It can help to group a person's online identity together - at least the parts that you want to show.
But there's one relatively minor item I don't like:
Aargh - a .dotfile directory just annoys me. Yes I know it's supposed to be virtual. But those kind of directories are easily missed, deleted, etc.
We've often gotten an entire directory of web files from other company and have been missing .htaccess files - having an entire directory that's effectively invisible to many FTP clients (and servers) and needs CMS support will be annoying.
Why not just:
GET /well-known/host-meta
FTP clients/servers won't hate it, it'll be much easier to get CMS systems to work with it and they won't get missed when an entire directory is getting moved/zipped/etc.
Isn't that just simpler?