Re: Towards Solid Lite

Hello!

Le samedi 28 octobre 2023 à 15:34 +0200, Melvin Carvalho a écrit :
> What do folks think about a simple lite subset of solid, with a
> streamlined process, set of test, developer on ramp, lighter process
> and useful eco system with full upgrade to 1.0 when it is there, via
> adding additional tests, from the test suite.

I definitely would like a lighter specification, as I would like to
implement my own server and client. Obviously everyone would want their
own definition of “light”, so maybe this would not be as useful as
wanted.

Here is my idea for a complexity ladder:

1. Everything is either public or private to the “owner”. Authorization
is much simpler, authentication need not be decentralized.

2. Everything is only writable by the “owner”, but other people can
read specific parts with (read-only) WAC. Authentication is done with
HTTP signatures.

3. The DPoP-based authentication scheme is supported.

As for other features, I would say:
 - json-ld is too complex to implement; there are libraries for some
languages but not all, and as we saw with ActivityPub, most projects
won’t use them anyway;
 - trying to sandbox applications is a bad idea in my opinion; we
should rather empower user to reject malicious applications;
 - I don’t think we should let other people write to our own pod. As we
saw with ActivityPub, we can have decentralized discussions where each
actor host their side of the discussion;
 - LDN inboxes should accept only links, and the sender should host
their notifications on their own pod, so that we don’t have to check
who is posting to our inbox. If the link dereferences to a notification
hosted on someone’s storage, then we can trust it is not forged.
Notifications can also be retracted or edited more easily;
 - automatically editing RDF resources (when the containment triples
for a container change, or when processing a PATCH request) is a little
uncomfortable, because we lose some of the readability of Turtle
(comments are discarded, blank nodes are made explicit). I don’t think
it is a big problem though.

Please don’t get disappointed if your idea of a lighter specification
is the exact opposite of what I describe here!

Best regards,

Vivien

Received on Saturday, 28 October 2023 14:55:16 UTC