Re: Summary of last week's W3C Technical Plenary (W3C TPAC)

Whilst I think it's quite dangerous to protest, I don't think people should
be defined by their wallets.  That wasn't the intention, when I helped
diversify from solely WebID.

He who has the gold rules...

Is only the golden rule for some.

It's important to support a plurality of modalities.  Else, no one will be
able to do much at all - without asking for permission first.   Something I
remember TimBL speaking about, how he didn't need to ask vint for
permission to build the web, at least the old version...

Timh.

On Wed, 21 Sept 2022, 9:23 am Paola Di Maio, <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Manu
>
> cc AI KR CG, FYI
>
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 8:55 AM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
> wrote:
>
>> What follows is an "information known to the general public" summary
>> of what happened last week at the W3C Technical Plenary (W3C TPAC -
>> where many of the global standards that drive the Verifiable
>> Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers ecosystem are standardized).
>>
>> There is more that is member-confidential that went on, and none of
>> that is covered in this email, though the most important things are
>> public knowledge due to the fact that W3C's Working Group minutes are
>> made public within hours/days of the member meetings -- hooray for
>> transparency! I'm looking at you, ISO (and all the other organizations
>> that don't make their meeting transcriptions public)! :P
>>
>> Apologies for the length, there is a lot to cover.
>>
>> -------------------------
>> The JSON-LD WG announced that JSON-LD is now published by 43% of all
>> websites on the Internet (based on Common Crawl statistics data) in
>> order to achieve better search rankings. To put that in perspective,
>> Fetch is used by 38% of all websites. WebAuthn is used by 0.19% of all
>> websites (ouch). More fun browser API stats at:
>>
>> https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/popularity
>>
>> It is worth noting that WebAuthn is typically implemented by the big
>> identity providers (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) so measuring the
>> number of domains that use it isn't a good measure of actual usage
>> because everyone gets funneled through centralized IdP to use WebAuthn
>> -- actual people impacted is probably be much higher, if only those
>> large IdPs would share their numbers! :P
>> ------------------------
>> The JSON-LD Working Group will be re-chartered to continue maintaining
>> the specification, with the ability to add new features. There is work
>> going into YAML-LD, and interest in taking up the CBOR-LD work as
>> well. There is parallel work also being proposed on "labeled property
>> graphs" (called RDF-star), which allow one to annotate properties
>> themselves (of dubious value to VCs at present). That work might
>> provide advantages to the path VCs have taken to date, but we won't
>> know for another 2+ years. It is explicitly not going to be disruptive
>> to what we've standardized to date at W3C.
>> -------------------------
>> The DID Working Group meeting had significant attendance (40-50
>> people). The goal was to settle on the next Working Group Charter. The
>> plan was to work towards agreeing to standardize a few DID Methods
>> (like did:key and did:web), and possibly start standardizing DID
>> Resolution. There were objections to standardizing DID Methods. If we
>> don't standardize at least a few DID Methods, we know that there will
>> be objections from some of the big-tech companies. There didn't seem
>> to be objections to DID Resolution or maintaining DID Core. I was able
>> to meet with some of the big tech companies and negotiate a potential
>> path forward via DID Resolution (without standardizing any DID
>> Methods). I still need to engage with some of the potential objectors
>> to see if they'd be amenable to the plan. There is a decent chance
>> they'll be ok with it.
>> ---------------------------
>> Support for the Verifiable Credentials Working Group is quite strong
>> (and growing). We were given significant air time in the all-hands
>> Advisory Committee meeting. The Working Group meeting hovered between
>> 42-56 people, which is quite large for a W3C Working Group.
>> There were no bombshells or any real drama to speak of in the meeting.
>> The group seems to be on a good trajectory. In general, doing work on
>> version 2.0 of anything tends to be easier than 1.0 because many of
>> the guard rails are already established for the work. More on
>> particular technology discussions that came up below. All slide decks
>> presented at the meeting can be found here (the ACDC slides take up
>> 112 slides, the other slide decks average around 10 slides per topic):
>>
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hrqozY2EGZ8i8y40abyEuJmIb6hCiRS-37pdj6bhBLY/edit
>> -------------------------------
>> I spent some time with the Accessible Platform Architectures Working
>> Group (the group that produces accessibility documents like the Web
>> Content Accessibility Guidelines that the US Government follows to
>> ensure Section 508 compliance). As a result of the conversation, they
>> will be working on a Digital Wallet Accessibility Guidelines document
>> over the next 1-2 years to ensure that digital wallets meet the
>> requirements of the 60 million people in the US with accessibility
>> needs. That guide might be integrated (in time) into WCAG, which is
>> incorporated into Section 508 in the US (and into other accessibility
>> regulation documents in other countries). They took this as an action
>> during the VCWG meeting and also provided some good news use cases
>> that we should be interested in (for example, Verifiable Credentials
>> for vaccination status of guide dogs crossing borders -- guide dogs
>> can be kept for days in kennels if the vaccination paperwork isn't up
>> to date, 'causing stress for both the animal and the individual
>> needing the aid from the animal).
>> -------------------------------
>> As mentioned above, the Verifiable Credentials WG meeting was fairly
>> uneventful. Orie did a great job counter-acting some of the explosion
>> of complexity being suggested for the core data model and keeping
>> things simple via JSON-LD. The streamlining Data Integrity cryptosuites
>> conversation didn't blow up into a hot mess and there seems to be a
>> workable path forward there (though, the details matter and we'll get
>> to those over the next couple of months). The holder binding
>> discussion and the JSON Schemas discussion will be interesting, but
>> non-disruptive. The RDF Dataset Canonicalization WG is under way and
>> seems to be on a good trajectory. We stayed away from discussing
>> digital wallet protocols, which was probably a good thing.
>> ----------------------------------
>> The SD-JWT work was introduced to the group as a selective disclosure
>> scheme for JSON payloads. There was some serious shade thrown at BBS
>> and AnonCreds during the meeting by the EU Digital Identity initiative
>> stating that "Our cryptographers have looked at both BBS and AnonCreds
>> and rejected them for being overly complex". Both Avast and Digital
>> Bazaar fired back noting the CFRG uptake of BBS at IETF and they
>> backed off to a "Oh, I mean, it's on an experimental path, but we are
>> committed to SD-JWT, which is not experimental and
>> uses NIST-approved cryptography."... people should be worried about
>> this. It feels rushed.
>> The JWP stuff is even further behind. There was a suggestion that
>> VC-JWT will be dropped for SD-JWT, or JWP, or maybe we'll keep all of
>> them, or something better will come along. This work could have a
>> negative effect on the greater community around VC interoperability.
>> Adding two new "securing VC" mechanisms to the existing two mechanisms
>> seems problematic. We'll have to give that spec more time to breathe
>> and improve.
>> ------------------------
>>
>> Those are my notes, I hope they are useful to those that were not able
>> to attend W3C TPAC. If others have notes on the stuff that's public
>> knowledge (via transcripts), please share.
>>
>> -- manu
>>
>> --
>> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
>> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
>> News: Digital Bazaar Announces New Case Studies (2021)
>> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>>
>>