Re: Proposal: Web Federation Protocol

Great idea!

fwiw, when people talk about federation, they usually mean setting up
application-specific decentralized hosting with server-to-server
messaging.

When you say 'the hyperlink solves this' i think you're talking at too
low a level, i think it's more accurate to say 'Indie Web + rww +
linked data solves it'.

About pingback, i don't understand exactly what it does, but i think
it is based on client-side certificates, so it can never replace
OStatus or Wave, which are able to function without the need for such
per-device state. So I think it should be considered a niche solution
within the web, just like PGP is a niche solution (and not for that
less valuable) within SMTP.

Having said that, if people start owning their own rww servers, and we
add some sort of real-time messaging to that, then i think on top of
that combination you could basically build the same things as both
OStatus and Apache Wave.


On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> There seems to be a few 'Federation' Protocols out there.
>
> Two of which are:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol
>
> Much of the discussion that goes on today in various project is oriented
> around how it's possible to make heterogeneous systems Federate.
>
> So I was thinking about proposing working on a document something along the
> lines of:
>
> 'The Web Federation Protocol'
>
> The document could contain some of the "deceptively simple" federation
> protocols that we have working in the wild, such as linked data and
> pingback.  In particular, if we can get others to implement pingback (which
> is normally less than a day's work), we can quickly develop an internet wide
> messaging system.
>
> Some of you might think, 'that's missing the point the Web is already
> federated via the URI (hyperlink) ', and there's certainly plenty of
> evidence to support this.
>
> However, to date I'm not sure there exists a very good explanation, for
> those that are trying to get a better understanding of the Web.
>
> Maybe we could put together a narrative, primer, or wiki article, to show
> how the Read Write Web is already federated, and how it's possible to take
> advantage, embrace and extend?
>
> Good idea / Bad idea ... any thoughts?

Received on Monday, 2 July 2012 04:02:36 UTC