Re: Webfinger

On 01/30/2015 06:00 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> On January 30, 2015 8:55:00 AM EST, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If we decide to use WebFinger here, then so be it. I personally feel
>> it's
>> easily possible to do significantly better.
> 
> Shall we open an ISSUE on this?   My sense is webfinger is kind of useful and also kind of annoying if you need to map email to proper IDs.
> 
> Even if webfinger were perfect for this, I'd probably still lean against using email addresses as primary identifiers for accounts.    I think.    Mostly I'm aware how much technical and social baggage they have.    Maybe I'm biased by my older-teen kids thinking of email as obsolete (and dumb).
> 

WebFinger maps from URIs to things like email and accounts, not the
other way around.

A new solution to the "discovery" problem is out of scope I'm pretty
sure. However, we can keep references to WebFinger as informative if
some folks prefer some other solution. I haven't seen anything deployed
in this space besides content negotation, which is again, basically
never actually used for well-known reasons regarding its set-up.

> The indieweb reasons against webfinger are mostly not compelling for me, but a few of them are.    If we're going to use it, I'd think we should update it to be JUST a mapping from email to profile URL.  That is, http://w3.org/.well-known/wf2?email= sandro@w3.org would http redirect to http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro.   And that would be the entirely of the standard, give or take edge cases.
> 

To cut and paste my previous email:

WebFinger is an IETF standard that seems fairly sensible and has fairly
widespread uptake:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7033/

In general,there are no issues with a normative dependency on an IETF
specification and thus my preference is that future W3C Social Web work
"pave the cowpaths" here.

[WebFinger] was not mentioned in charter because it is considered a
finished standard, and a new standard was not necessary.

It is likely not a hard dependency unless we normatively describe
discovery, which we could simply discuss informatively.

>     - Sandro
> 
>> On Jan 30, 2015 4:15 AM, "☮ elf Pavlik ☮"
>> <perpetual-tripper@wwelves.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 01/28/2015 09:54 PM, James M Snell wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
>> wrote:
>>>>> I kind of like the trick of having the identifier for the account
>> (aka
>>>>> persona) also be the URL for the profile.  I'd also make that the
>> root
>>> URL
>>>>> for the user's webspace.   EG http://tantek.com/  or
>>>>> http://sandhawke.livejournal.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> I know some people don't like that, though, so maybe we can't
>> collapse
>>> the
>>>>> three.    Still, it's painful to have the identifier for the
>>> account/persona
>>>>> not be either of those two URLs.    If it's not one of those, what
>> is
>>> it,
>>>>> and how can we make sure people understand it and use it
>> correctly?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I agree that it would be ideal to collapse these but I don't
>> believe
>>>> we can get away with it entirely. For instance, within IBM we have
>> a
>>>> corporate "Intranet ID" which is essentially our work email
>> addresses.
>>>> We use these ID's to log in to various services internally,
>> including
>>>> our internal deployment of our Connections product. We have a
>> couple
>>>> of different systems that provide a Profile that describes an
>>>> individual. The Connections Profile is distinct from our Corporate
>>>> Employee Directory profile although there is a trend towards
>> combining
>>>> the two. In this case, the two profiles have distinct URL
>> identifiers
>>>> separate from our "Intranet ID" identifier.
>>>>
>>>> Using the rough sketch model I describe above, an instance of this
>>>> would look like:
>>>>
>>>> <mailto:jasnell@us.ibm.com> a :Identity, :Persona ;
>>>>   describedBy
>> <http://directory.example.org/?id=jasnell@us.ibm.com>,
>>>>           <http://connections.example.org/profiles?id=abc123> .
>>>>
>>>>  <http://directory.example.org/?id=jasnell@us.ibm.com> a :Profile ;
>>>>   describes <mailto:jasnell@us.ibm.com> .
>>>>
>>>> <http://connections.example.org/profiles?id=abc123> a :Profile ;
>>>>   describes <mailto:jasnell@us.ibm.com> .
>>>>
>>>> Now again, this is just a rough sketch model to help frame the
>>>> conversation. I'm not arguing that this is how we have to model the
>>>> API... only that these are the conceptual elements we need to be
>>>> thinking about.
>>> I understand that you don't use webfinger and acct: scheme?
>>>
>>> We discussed depending on webfinger recently:
>>>
>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/2014Nov/0201.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
> 
> Shall
>

Received on Friday, 30 January 2015 21:28:30 UTC