Re: Let's blow some new life into this community group

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Markus Sabadello
<markus.sabadello@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the "HTML5 data layer"?
> - There are the data-* attributes, which are meant for use by JavaScript
> within an HTML5 page.
> - There is also HTML5 microdata, i.e. simple semantic markup for embedding
> data in a page.
> - Or do you mean Linked Data, RDF, JSON-LD, that sort of thing.

i've started implementing useraddress.net (working title), my
cross-origin search engine for the fedsocweb. it works pretty well so
far, and while programming yesterday, i realised it doesn't matter
which format people use, we should support all of them. In particular,
there is an example in the webfinger spec that uses
webfinger.net/rel/avatar and some people have adopted this, others
haven't. Even when foaf is used, the way to link to it is different
across implementations.

Other domains don't even seem to support any generic discovery
mechanisms, but the data on there is still machine-readable so with a
few host-specific rules we can still extract it. All in all, this is
not a problem, and i was able to get full name + avatar lookup working
on statusnet, twitter, facebook, and google without much trouble.
Buddycloud will probably be a bit more work because i probably need to
get an xmpp client from somewhere, but friendica and diaspora also
look quite straightforward at first glance.

about open knowledge vs privacy i'm still in two minds, i think this
search engine should be a collaborative cache whose contents is owned
by the public domain, much like ur1.ca, but at the same time i don't
want to make data findable that people were relying on to be
unfindable (even though it was available over public http).

Anyway, my conclusion is that even if people use webfinger there are
different formats we have to consider, and even if they don't, we can
still quite easily route around that with either per-host rules for
the identity format, or the user remembering their full http URI, or
by discovering new users by going through public friend lists in foaf
profiles of others.

So yes, useraddress.net will (once i finish all the code for this) be
able to deal with pretty much any crazy way people can invent to
publish their machine-readable identity, not only by-the-book
webfinger.


Cheers,
Michiel

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 10:47:38 UTC