Writing v1.0 of the Solid specification

Dear all,

The current specification for Solid is located at https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/.
There are a couple of issues with this version:

– It is a loose set of markdown documents, not a single, authoritative looking spec.

– These documents are out of sync with reality:
  – Some features that are described, are purposely not implemented.
  – Some features that are purposely implemented, are not described.
  – Some features are purposely implemented differently than the spec prescribes.

– The documents leave ambiguity in many places,
   meaning that they are insufficient to implement Solid.

– Not everything in these documents has gone through a decision process:
  – Some features might be undesirable as basic requirements of Solid,
     for instance, for computational reasons.
  – Some decisions were taken pragmatically some time ago,
     but do not necessarily reflect how we want to continue.


The reasons above should show that there is a need
to arrive at a consistent Solid specification.


My proposal for this is to start a new document for v1.0
that follows the W3C specification template,
and to use GitHub’s pull request mechanism
to add curated sections of content to it.

As a follow-up on https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/issues/170,
I have currently created the repository
at https://github.com/solid/specification/commits/gh-pages
with a live version at https://solid.github.io/specification/.

These curated sections would come from the current spec documents,
but they would be rewritten to be accurate and unambiguous,
and people in the community should be given the opportunity
to comment on texts that get into the spec.

This process will require processes for moving forward:
https://github.com/solid/specification/issues/1
and likely 2–3 spec editors
(in addition to all of the past and current spec authors):
https://github.com/solid/specification/issues/2

I have also proposed this as a discussion topic for the next meeting:
https://www.w3.org/community/solid/wiki/Meetings#20190516_1000CEST

As always, feedback most welcome.

Best,

Ruben

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2019 22:13:01 UTC