Few responses on this topic:

On May 25, 2010, at 7:08 AM, Manger, James H wrote:

> Justin,
> 
>> I don't want to always have to grab "token[0]" from the response where 
>> before i just grabbed "token".
> 
> Surely token[0] vs token is too trivial to be an issue.

It's a pretty reasonable issue to raise. Extra complexity when not needed in 
the common case bogs down the spec.

>> Also, this approach ties us to a hierarchical data representation format 
>> like JSON instead of being able to use anything that can hand us simple 
>> key-value pairs. Hashtables/dictionaries/associative-arrays are very easy to 
>> manipulate and understand in many languages.
> 
> An array is even simpler than a hashtable. An array of hashtables is still 
> very easy to manipulate in any language. Info on any particular token can 
> still be a hashtable.

A URL of a=1&b=2 is naturally a hashtable. There is no natural way to represent 
arrays in URL parameters. PHP even converts normal arrays into hashtables. 
Generally it's much easier for developers to deal with simple key/value pairs.

> I have some reluctance in supporting multiple tokens as, say, 50% of early 
> services might not use them initially.

Where do you get this stat from? Facebook has no need for multiple tokens, and 
generally 

> However there are enough real use cases that I do think OAuth2 needs to 
> support multiple tokens. If, in a few years, 99% of services make do with a 
> single token then no one will bother coding the extra complexity and code 
> will trivially skip the extraneous "[" and "]" around the token info (ie no 
> harm done for service-specific apps; limited hassle for generic apps). More 
> likely is that if we don't support multiple tokens a bunch of use cases can't 
> be supported and an incompatible OAuth3 will be needed next year (major harm 
> for everyone).

As Justin suggested, I think it would be a good exercise to figure out how your 
requirements could be represented as a backwards-compatible extension instead 
of increasing complexity of the core spec. I'm confident that this would not 
require a rewrite of the protocol.

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