Re: Call for consensus/feedback: inconsistency between AS2's normative context document and normative vocabulary document

Context: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/595#issuecomment-4410948326
CG earlier message:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2026Apr/0037.html
WG earlier message:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/2026Apr/0012.html

On activitystreams#595, about 3 weeks ago I requested
consensus/feedback and we have gotten no responses on the mailing
list, but a couple of responses on the GitHub issue. Per the most
recent comment, I invite feedback to a specific question:

- "How do you use (or not use) the Link entity of AS2?"

My assumption is that anyone using a Link in an AS2 document intends
it to be a "link"; in other words, it is a reference to the link
target, and you can browse or navigate to that target. I am expecting
that most people typically don't try to process a Link.href as a
literal value, e.g. finding its literal length or character count, or
performing arithmetic concatenation or trimming on it.

However, my other suspicion is that AS2 Links might actually not be
widely used as much as suspected. You might find it as the value of an
Object.url, but pretty much every other property is way more likely to
use a direct reference instead of indirect reference. In other words,
you expect something like this:

```
{
  "actor": "https://alice.example/"
}
```

Or this:

```
{
  "actor": {"id": "https://alice.example/", "name": "Alice"}
}
```

But maybe not this:

```
{
  "actor": {"type": "Link", "href": "https://alice.example/"}
}
```

And probably not this:

```
{
  "actor": {"type": "Link", "href": {"@value":
"https://alice.example/", "type":
"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#anyURI"}}
}
```

Does my intuition match what other people think about this? Please
weigh in either here on the mailing list(s) or on the GitHub issue
itself.

Received on Saturday, 9 May 2026 01:43:42 UTC