Re: Refactoring audience targeting and activity target/origin

On 04/12/2015 06:28 PM, James M Snell wrote:
> I'd like to propose a bit of a breaking change that refactors and
> simplifies audience targeting and the use of the target/origin
> properties in the vocabulary.
> 
> Currently (in AS2 and AS1), we would use the "target" property to
> indicate the object to which an activity is *directed*. For instance,
> if I wanted to say "Evan added a Photo to his Album", the "target"
> property indicates the "his Album".
> 
> The "origin" property was just recently (speculatively) introduced as
> a way of identifying the object *from* which an activity is directed.
> For instance, "Evan moved a photo from Album A to Album B", the
> "origin" would specify "Album A", the target would specify "Album B".
> 
> With the audience targeting properties, we use "to", "bto", "cc" and
> "bcc" to help indicate who should to notified.
> 
> What I'd like to propose is collapsing these concepts in order to
> simplify the vocabulary overall.
> 
> We would rename "target" to "to", deprecating the original name "target"
> We would rename "origin" to "from" (no need to deprecate "origin"
> since it's new)
> We could continue to use "to" for implicit audience targeting (just as
> we can use "target" today) but "cc" and "bcc" would become the primary
> explicit audience targeting properties.
> 
> In other words, if I wanted to say, "Evan moved a photo from Album A
> to Album B, please notify Arnaud", it would be:
> 
> {
>   "actor": "evan@example.org",
>   "object": {
>     "@type": "Image",
>     "url": "http://example.org/abc.png"
>   },
>   "from": {
>     "@type": "Album",
>     "displayName": "Album A"
>   },
>   "to": {
>     "@type": "Album",
>     "displayName": "Album B"
>   },
>   "cc": "arnaud@example.org"
> }
> 
> Semantically this is easier to explain and understand.
> 
> It would require a change for folks who currently do audience
> targeting using "to" (which is why I'm cc'ing Evan directly to make
> sure he sees it) but overall I think the change makes sense and
> simplifies the vocabulary overall.
> 
> Thoughts?
-1 mixing terms used for describing the actual Activity with anything to
do with 'audience targeting'! I see describing an Activity and it's
distribution / notifications as two very distinct concerns and would
prefer to keep them nicely separated.

BTW once we iron out how to structure an Activity itself, we may need to
rethink distribution/notifications all together, paying more attention
to API & Federation work. Also we better make sure that tagging in a
photo, mentioning etc. fits nicely with to, cc, bto, bcc stuff.