Re: making the webcredits.org spec more strict about 'source' and 'destination' fields.

On 24 April 2012 20:45, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Melvin Carvalho <
> melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I think the subtle point here that most dont get, is that http urls are
>> documents as defined by the protocol.  And anything inside the documents as
>> denoted with a # are data points.  The hard thing in this is web developers
>> having to UNLEARN their previous assumptions.  This single point causes no
>> end of chaos!  The other problem is that the web, like html, is fault
>> tolernt, so that if you get it wrong your system will probably still work!
>> :)
>>
>> The challenge is to getting the language right so that it's easily
>> understood in the short spec doc., in particular so that people can get up
>> and running in under a day.  I'm going to put out a draft in the next few
>> days that is hopefully more understandable.
>>
>
> Section 11.5.1 of Draft 12 of the OpenID 2.0 spec recommends that OPs
> assign a unique url fragment to an OpenID url that changes when the OpenID
> changes ownership.
>
> an appended generation identifier is very different from having the URL
> refer to a big document (say, a roster) and the fragment point to a part of
> it (page and line of someone's listing in the roster.)
>
> The specification for fragments,
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.5 , pretty much says
> "anything goes" and delegates all fragment interpretation to specific
> schemes, so an identity scheme (even an OpenID 2.0 provider that uses
> fragments for more than generation differentiation) seems conformant.
>
> I suggest that example identity strings in the short spec doc don't have
> fragments in them, also that the sentence where you state that any URL will
> do could affirm that when fragments are provided, the fragment is important
> and MUST NOT get stripped.
>
> How about http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3966#section-5.1.4 globally
> unique telephone numbers of well-known services for the examples? Is that
> too cute?
>

BTW thanks for these comments, it got me thinking.  In the Read Write Web
Group we are experimenting with distributed social networks.  I'm hoping to
announce the first federation of networks starting to talk to each other
using the semantic 'pingback' protocol for distributed messaging.

Pingback is very simple, it has 3 fields:

source
target
comment

Which is actually almost identical to the webcredits fields which basically
adds

amount
currency

Therefore, there's every hope that once we get a robust pingback
(messaging) system going, it will be relatively simple to extend it to
payments!

Received on Tuesday, 24 April 2012 22:58:53 UTC