RE: spec: 2 changes, UML sequence and protocol

Why?

Because its no longer about simply using https to help do access control to
resources, based on client certs, SSL client authn, and certs/pubkeys stored
in homepages.

Its morphed into general identifier land theory, now addressing discovery,
webid-based personal privacy, service location. It's become a "grand tour"
of the web architecture, philosophically profound and intellectually
weighty. Peter Groans (since that means weighty politics during vendor
adoption, while engineers argue to the end of time over the topics, already
argued over 10 times in the last 30 years). I smell lots and lots of
divisive religion (which means I look elsewhere, typically)

Now, I don't mind the wider mission (I think its great that a web security
layer would support all of secure discovery, personal privacy enforcement,
secure service location,...)

But, it needs a family of documents: the webid architecture, the webid
"pingback" protocol (just stating how to be a validation agent doing cert
pingbacks), the webid discovery, the webid privacy, the webid service
location

Im thus objecting to the presentation medium (which affects adoption); not
the wider mission itself. The means of presenting the bigger mission is
getting in the way of adopting stuff that works.

But feel free to push back; this is just raw opinion. 

It's an incubator. And, using specs as the medium for incubator results
seems strange. Its like we are pretending to be a WG. I don't like
pretences.

Perhaps, we should distinguish the incubator "report" from the specs - where
the report characterizes the war goals, while the spec just defines the
battle plan for the webid protocol, doing cert pingback


-----Original Message-----
From: peter williams [mailto:home_pw@msn.com] 
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 4:36 AM
To: 'Henry Story'; 'WebID Incubator Group WG'
Subject: RE: spec: 2 changes, UML sequence and protocol


I don't like the spec in general (technical part is generally fine).

-----Original Message-----
From: public-xg-webid-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-webid-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Henry Story
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 3:13 AM
To: WebID Incubator Group WG
Subject: Re: spec: 2 changes, UML sequence and protocol

Is everyone satisfied with these changes? 

Henry

On 23 Feb 2011, at 19:08, Henry Story wrote:

> I have made the following 2. changes to my local git repository that are
slightly related
> 
> 1. UML sequence
> - Added a UML sequence diagram in graffle and jpg format (so others can
edit)
> - Added that UML into the spec
> - also added the graffle source for the other image
> 
> 2. the protocol sequence
> 
> I then had to look how the protocol sequence fitted the sequence diagram,
which led me in a second step to:
> 
> - remove the implication that the authentication server must authenticate
ALL the WebIDS. Peter Williams had some very convincing arguments as to why
that was a bad idea
> - reordered the sequence of events: TLS private key authentication happens
before the certs are extracted before other layers get access to the
certificate. 
> - removed the note about  "a digital signature challenge" that was never
discussed
> 
> My version is here:
>   http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/02/23/index-respec.html
> 
> If you press cntr-alt-shift-S in your browser you will have a dialog that
will allow you to get a visual diff from the current version. It seems to
have a bug as it shows a lot more changes that were made.
> The only relevant ones are in section 3.1
> 
> I am trying to find a tool to give me a url for a visual diff of the
source code between the two versions but was not able to find one.
> 
>  Feeback welcome,
> 
>  Henry
> 
> 
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Saturday, 26 February 2011 12:52:15 UTC