Re: the possible impact of future changes in webfinger (was Re: Anonymity and multiple identities)

On 7 July 2012 13:35, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> Webfinger should be a standard by now, or at least the peer reviewed
> documentation of an existing process.  Despite your claims to the contrary,
> it is not.  It's not a particularly complex problem to solve, and we've been
> waiting for 3 years.  The IETF have made it clear that is has some severe
> weaknesses, and that everything is still on the table including a rewrite
> (depending on what track it chooses, standards or informational).
>
> In the meantime linked data, and for example facebook open graph, have
> become standards and have been adopted by 10's of millions of sites, as a
> way of discovering information.

In standards work, it's important to be simultaneously very patient
and very impatient! As you hint here re FB 'standards', there are
various things that can count as standardization, including adoption.
So IETF isn't the only possibility here, and things can progress even
if the standards continue to evolve. It's always possible to improve
things (eg. opensource implementations) even while waiting for final
signoff on some version of some standard.

Regarding "in the meantime linked data"; you make this sound like an
overnight success. The RDF project has been going since 1997, and was
heavily based on earlier work from 1995/6, ... which in turn was based
on previous efforts. The important thing is to keep moving, and to
keep making progress. Sometimes things happen really quickly, but
often because other things have been quietly falling into place for a
much longer time.

> I'm perfectly happy for you to evangelize your preferred way to solve a
> problem.  However, I think pretending that your solution is the ONLY
> solution is inaccurate.

It's best to avoid words like 'pretend' when talking about other
people's actions and intentions. Good typically doesn't come of it...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2012 13:28:38 UTC