Re: New proposal for the DID WG charter

Hi Jeffrey,

On 31/10/2023 18:36, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:
> A concrete question I have is "if a client (or resolver) receives a did: 
> URL whose method it doesn't understand, what's it supposed to do?" I 
> think we can practically expect interoperability among non-standardized 
> DID methods if there's a standardized algorithm to answer that question. 
> If the answer is, instead, "you need to just know the URL to a resolver 
> that understands the method", it's hard for me to expect that software 
> from different vendors will tend to be able to reliably exchange did: URLs.

Do you mind clarifying a bit what your expectations are here? It's not 
obvious to me that the standard answer for a DID you don't know how to 
resolve ought to be anything other than some equivalent of 406 Not 
Acceptable?

The DID space is whittling down and I expect it to whittle down further. 
It's a bit like image formats: we haven't really figured out a way to 
have just one, once in a blue moon we introduce a new one, we don't have 
a wonderful way of managing unknown formats when they are introduced 
(some exist, but they're provided at a separate layer like HTML or 
HTTP). I would expect that we can get good enough interop from a similar 
arrangement. It won't be perfect, but it'll still be better than what we 
had pre-DID.


> On Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 3:08 PM Markus Sabadello
> <markus@danubetech.com <mailto:markus@danubetech.com>> wrote:
>         - A resolver can indicate to clients which DID methods it supports

This feels useful.

>         - A resolver can "forward" or "redirect" requests for
>         unsupported DID methods to other resolvers (the current DID
>         Resolution draft already mentions this)
I'm a lot less certain about the forwarding part of this. DID resolution 
could leak information, and having a resolver opaquely decide to forward 
strikes me as undesirable. Responding with a see-other list of resolvers 
it believes can handle it (as a form of redirect) seems better.

-- 
Robin Berjon (he/him)
Governance & Standards at Protocol Labs
https://berjon.com/ - https://bsky.app/profile/robin.berjon.com

Received on Wednesday, 1 November 2023 13:50:18 UTC