Re: WebID Frustration

Hello Norman,
Yes, now I have it installed I like it for the same reasons that you do.
And yes, there are very few people (I guess), who would want to do it by hand.
But actually I didn't; what I wanted was a WebID that didn't create an account somewhere (most of the sites I found offer an account that comes with a WebID as a side-effect).
I think people are rather careful about where they put these things - what will the personal information be over there?; will the site exist long enough?…
I looked a quite a few sites before choosing where my OpenID would be.
But I would have much preferred to have it on my home domain (and others on my work domains?).
Which is what this great WebID offers.

Actually, this whole thing seems to me (I now realise) nothing to do with WedID per se.
It is about creating and editing FOAF files.
You wouldn't want to do what I wanted unless you had a FOAF file (or were creating one.
And that is still a real problem.
http://wiki.foaf-project.org/w/FAQ#How_do_I_create_my_first_FOAF_document.3F
tells me http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic and http://www.formsplayer.com/demo/foaf/foaf-creator.html
The first of those is pretty old, and rather dodgy, as I recall, and the second doesn't respond.

Pretty sad really.
Anyone up for read/write creation/editing of FOAF files, including WebID and all the latest goodness?
Or maybe such a thing exists, and I don't know?
Surely we can manage that for what is after all one of the great success of the SemWeb?

Best
Hugh

On 6 Aug 2013, at 21:49, Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
 wrote:

> 
> Hugh, hello.
> 
> On 2013 Aug 6, at 21:17, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> It still seems to me that this is not a technology that is very useable - it really shouldn't have taken so many messages to help me!
>> I was thinking of setting up for my users to use WebID on a little social networking site I have, but I think I will give it a miss for the moment!
> 
> I think I disagree -- I now think that WebID _is_ extremely usable... _once it's working the first time_.[1]  As of this afternoon, I'm a Fan.
> 
> I've been repeatedly surprised, today, in finding out just how easy it's been to log in to a couple of different services: I go to a web site, my browser (Chrome and Safari on OS X) spontaneously asks me which certificate I want to use, I select one, and ... that's it.[2]
> 
> Yes, it's a bit of a pain to set up because (like most things involving the semantic web stack *sigh*) it requires one to know a little bit about more, and more disparate, things than do most technologies.  But that's OK: the membership of this list probably constitutes a large fraction (10%?) of the world population of folk who might plausibly be interested in setting up a WebID identity/presence/wotsit by hand.  Any usability problem for this group doesn't matter, to first order.  A social networking site such as you mention is surely exactly the place which should be offering this sort of facility for its users, and if that involves a bit of head-scratching for its creator, that's a price the world will pay!  This seems to be the model gestured towards by the WebID document at <http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID#Do_I_already_have_a_WebID.3F>
> 
> [1] It's not clear to me how a use of a social networking site, which supports WebIDs for its users, gets the certificate into their browser.  Is it just "click on this link and if it says 'can I install?' say yes!"?
> 
> [2] How does the service tell my client to do the WebID dance?  I can imagine it's in <http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/> somewhere, but is there a one-line answer? (that document talks about Alice and Bob, and they always make my heart sink)
> 
> I'm still a bit un-thrilled by the range of services I can get to (though thanks for the links, Kingsley and Melvin), but I suspect that's just a matter of getting over an uptake hump.
> 
> Also, and most amazingly, this is the first _ever_ X.509 application I've come across that isn't a massive UI train-wreck.  Hitherto, OS X Mail and Keychain had been the out-of-sight winners, having ascended to the giddy heights of merely 'poor' (I recently had to renew a grid certificate, and that CA has improved massively in the last couple of years -- very well done to them, on limited resources -- so that it is now 'bad, but rising 'poor' if you know what you're doing').
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Norman
> 
> 
> -- 
> Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2013 21:58:46 UTC