Re: Refactoring audience targeting and activity target/origin

Chris,

AS2 is agnostic to the kinds of identifiers used and should remain so.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Christopher Allan Webber
<cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
> 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 Monday, 13 April 2015 16:19:53 UTC