Re: New proposal for the DID WG charter

Hello Chris,

I think those of us who have worked on DID Resolution share your 
interest in increasing interoperability.

We cannot and do not want to remove the abstraction layer that is 
inherent to DIDs via the DID method design.
We have always believed that the fact that each DID method defines its 
CRUD operations in a different way (while using a standardized DID 
syntax and DID document format) is one of the most powerful features of 
DIDs.

However, the DID Resolution draft defines an HTTP interface for 
resolving DIDs and dereferencing DID URLs.
Using this interface, any client can talk to any resolver/dereferencer 
in exactly the same way, independent of the chosen DID method.
So while DID Core defined this interface only in an abstract way, DID 
Resolution goes one step further by defining a concrete HTTP binding.
I believe this would achieve the "practical interoperability" goal 
articulated at TPAC, would you agree?

In addition, several other ideas have come up which the WG could perhaps 
explore:
- A resolver can indicate to clients which DID methods it supports
- A resolver can "forward" or "redirect" requests for unsupported DID 
methods to other resolvers (the current DID Resolution draft already 
mentions this)

I'd be curious about your thoughts on this.

all the best,
Markus

On 10/5/23 22:33, Chris Wilson wrote:
> I wanted to share our response here.
>
> We are still somewhat concerned, as we detailed in our support for 
> this charter prior to these changes, that the group needs to focus on 
> increasing interoperability. We did express that a sufficiently 
> rigorous DID Resolution specification could achieve this goal, but the 
> draft at https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-resolution/ does not appear to 
> be going in that direction and in fact adds a new dependency on 
> unstandardized Method functionality (defining how to dereference a 
> path and query).  While we don't formally object to these changes to 
> the charter, we're concerned about them, and we might object to 
> advancing this sort of DID Resolution spec to Recommendation if we 
> believe it does not resolve our previous concerns with the 
> interoperability goals.  We are happy to respond and give feedback on 
> the goal of interoperability on the group's work along the way if that 
> would be helpful.
>
> On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 11:40 AM Pierre-Antoine Champin 
> <pierre-antoine@w3.org> wrote:
>
>     Dear all (DID WG + AC rep who voted on the charter proposal),
>
>     you will find here :
>     https://github.com/w3c/charter-drafts/pull/448
>
>     a set of proposed changes on the DID charter proposal that take into
>     account most of the comments in the AC review and the discussions
>     that
>     happened at TPAC (during the DID meeting, and after).
>
>     Feel free to comment directly in the PR, or by responding to this
>     email.
>
>         best
>

Received on Sunday, 29 October 2023 22:08:38 UTC