Regarding CBOR-LD Web Transports

Some folks have asked for more details about QR Code encoding and CBOR-LD.

I pushed up this small demo showing how to transport JSON-LD as CBOR-LD
over QR Code and Web NFC.

https://github.com/transmute-industries/cbor-ld-web-transports

I would love to support Web Bluetooth and WebRTC at some point with a
similar demo.

I'm really enjoying working with CBOR-LD, even though it's still pretty
young I think it holds tremendous promise, particularly because of its
support for losses bi-directional transformations with JSON (LD).

You cannot semantically operate on compressed JSON, and working with
vanilla CBOR tooling is fairly frustrating, although I will admit that
CBOR-LD is currently a layer of frustration on top of that.

The main problem with CBOR is the centralized tag registry (same problem
with JOSE, where is my BLS12381?.... how many years till that gets added?).

As long as you don't have anything complex to represent this approach is
fine, but it falls completely apart in an open world model.

My favorite part of CBOR-LD is how it manages to build on the CBOR registry
concept while enabling open world data modeling.

I am particularly excited about the future integration of CBOR-LD with
IPLD, I've always been a bit bothered by the way that JSON and content
addressing have interacted, for example, IPLD has codec similar to CBOR-LD,
but they don't really understand the data they are processing if its in
JSON, and it's not really IPLD's fault... JSON as a format is not really
that descriptive... it is it's greatest strength and second greatest
weakness (first is lack of comment support).

When we designed Sidetree we ended up compressing everything before giving
it a content identifier, and then when I read this part of the WebAuthN
spec I cried a small amount:

https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/#sctn-large-blob-extension

Compression really ought to be transparent to the user... I wish CBOR-LD
had been more mature when we were working on this part of Sidetree, it
would have been awesome to retain semantic operability on content addressed
resources without constantly inflating and deflating them... when files get
large the overhead for those operations starts to hurt.

Thanks to Digital Bazaar for kicking off CBOR-LD, we're excited to see it
grow.


OS


-- 
*ORIE STEELE*
Chief Technical Officer
www.transmute.industries

<https://www.transmute.industries>