Re: AS2/AP tasks for a chartered social web working group

> On Sep 15, 2023, at 07:52, Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:
> 
> I’d like to suggest that we keep the scope of the WG limited to maintenance of the existing recommendations …. strict backwards compatibility and b) hewing closely to current practices. I would call any new specs “1.1” or “2.1” to show that these are iterative, compatible changes.

+1. We have an existing, operational, growing network here. Our number one goal needs to be to keep it operating, so this is the time for incremental (not revolutionary) steps forward.

> Here are a couple of things I think we could do that would be a stretch:
> An OAuth 2.0 profile for ActivityPub API. We left authentication out of the original spec, and I think it’s made it harder for implementers. That said, I think this should probably be a FEP first before being part of the spec.

It would be useful to take a “whole-product” / “end-to-end user experience” approach to look at what works and what doesn’t work for users, and based on that, figure out what else could be improved. This is an example.

However, I don’t think this is ready for “standardization”. So the logical place for such work isn’t in a W3C WG group (yet).

> Document the use of HTTP Signatures.

Yes, please. And I would add:

* Document the use of WebFinger. In practice, it’s necessary to make interop work and it is currently left as an exercise for the implementor to figure that out.

Cheers,



Johannes.


Johannes Ernst

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