Re: Refactoring audience targeting and activity target/origin

James M Snell writes:

> I'd like to propose a bit of a breaking change that refactors and
> simplifies audience targeting and the use of the target/origin
> properties in the vocabulary.
>
> Currently (in AS2 and AS1), we would use the "target" property to
> indicate the object to which an activity is *directed*. For instance,
> if I wanted to say "Evan added a Photo to his Album", the "target"
> property indicates the "his Album".
>
> The "origin" property was just recently (speculatively) introduced as
> a way of identifying the object *from* which an activity is directed.
> For instance, "Evan moved a photo from Album A to Album B", the
> "origin" would specify "Album A", the target would specify "Album B".
>
> With the audience targeting properties, we use "to", "bto", "cc" and
> "bcc" to help indicate who should to notified.
>
> What I'd like to propose is collapsing these concepts in order to
> simplify the vocabulary overall.
>
> We would rename "target" to "to", deprecating the original name "target"
> We would rename "origin" to "from" (no need to deprecate "origin"
> since it's new)
> We could continue to use "to" for implicit audience targeting (just as
> we can use "target" today) but "cc" and "bcc" would become the primary
> explicit audience targeting properties.
>
> In other words, if I wanted to say, "Evan moved a photo from Album A
> to Album B, please notify Arnaud", it would be:
>
> {
>   "actor": "evan@example.org",
>   "object": {
>     "@type": "Image",
>     "url": "http://example.org/abc.png"
>   },
>   "from": {
>     "@type": "Album",
>     "displayName": "Album A"
>   },
>   "to": {
>     "@type": "Album",
>     "displayName": "Album B"
>   },
>   "cc": "arnaud@example.org"
> }
>
> Semantically this is easier to explain and understand.
>
> It would require a change for folks who currently do audience
> targeting using "to" (which is why I'm cc'ing Evan directly to make
> sure he sees it) but overall I think the change makes sense and
> simplifies the vocabulary overall.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - James

It personally seems like it would be just fine to me!

BTW, we agreed against webfinger/email type identifiers for the Social
API / Federation API stuff.  Does that also apply to ActivityStreams 2
stuff, or is it considered out of scope in AS2 to decide exactly what an
actor's identifier might be, whether something email-like or just a
link?

(Sorry if I'm missing something obvious on this one!)
 - Chris

Received on Sunday, 12 April 2015 18:47:41 UTC