Re: objections to webmention

On 6 June 2016 at 04:41, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:

>
>
> On June 5, 2016 2:14:49 PM PDT, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >On 5 June 2016 at 22:20, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> While I agree with Melvin's design aesthetics, I acknowledge that's
> >what
> >> they are.  There's no _functional_ problem with the current spec, and
> >while
> >> JSON-LD and URIs seem like a good practice, there's nothing written
> >in
> >> stone that says Thou Must Use URIs.
> >>
> >> I disagree however that it's a general purpose messaging framework.
> >It's
> >> explicitly (per the one sentence introduction):
> >>   "[...] a Webmention is a notification that one URL links to
> >another."
> >>
> >>
> >> Basing any understanding of webmention on the non-normative
> >extensions
> >> referenced seems like a trap to be avoided.  I (personally) would
> >simply
> >> remove Appendix B and focus on the actual value of the main
> >specification.
> >> Extensibility without namespaces at web scale is just impossible, and
> >may
> >> be leading to some of the confusion and design questions.
> >>
> >
> >Well put!
> >
> >So is webmention extensible, or is it not extensible.  I think this
> >could
> >be clearer.
> >
>
> We need to distinguish between centralized extensibility like in html5,
> css, uri schemes, schema.org, http headers, etc, and decentralized
> extensibility, as in RDF or link headers.
>
> Webmention has centralized extensibility.   Activity streams (by using
> json-ld) has decentralized extensibility.
>
> Personally, I feel like decentralized extensibility is a moral and
> psychological issue, but I'm well aware that the case for decentralized
> extensibility is weak.    The vision is of a wonderfully free and open yet
> interoperable ecosystem, but in practice that doesn't seem to happen. By
> far the greatest adoption of RDF happened when it was coupled with
> schema.org, with only centralized extensibility.
>
> Given that, I think webmention is fine having only centralized
> extensibility.
>

Slightly conflicting replies to the question.  Can I take away that
webmention is indeed designed to be extensible, through some yet to be
described, centralized means?

At this point, Im not attempting to debate the pros and cons of
centralization vs decentralization in the social web, more initially to
clarify the nature of the work.

Im also going to suggest that the general case of this problem has already
been solved by existing W3C RECs -- that might be a more contentious point,
so I would be happy to hear if people think that's not the case.

>
>
>      - Sandro
>
>
> >
> >>
> >> Rob
> >>
> >>
>
>