Re: WebID default serialization for WebID 2.x

> On 26. Jan 2022, at 00:58, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> 
> On 1/25/22 6:08 PM, Nathan Rixham wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:58 PM Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>> On 1/25/22 4:29 PM, Nathan Rixham wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 9:23 PM Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>>> On 1/25/22 1:28 PM, Nathan Rixham wrote:
>>>> Would a fair definition of a valid WebId then be something like: A URI is a valid WebIdentifier if it dereferences to a valid WebId-Profile describing the URI with the minimum set of required properties (type, name, public_keys)?
>>> A WebID is a resolvable identifier that denotes an agent. It resolves to a WebID Profile Document.
>>> 
>>>  How do you know it's a WebID before you resolve it?
>> Good question!
>> 
>> By deciding the want to denote yourself using a given identifier, relative to your profile document.
>> 
>> Let me rephrase, and suggest looking at it the other way around: given a random IRI <y> how do I know <y> is a webid / refers to an Agent, without first resolving it? and as a sub point, is a "valid" webid?
> 
> 
> You know it is a WebID because the spec says its is a URI that denotes an Agent. That's it, really :) 
> 

You used to know it’s a WebID because we had the cert ontology that related the WebID to a public Key.
The core purpose of having a WebID was to tie it into the WebID-TLS authentication scheme. 

For me that authentication piece has now moved over to using the IETFS ”Signing HTTP Messages”.
I have an implementation in Scala https://github.com/bblfish/httpSig that compiles to JS and Java
and am working on the authentication part.

Now WebID is still key in the Solid ecosystem as a way to tie together many different identifiers
for agents, links to their apps, their stores, etc… So that community is a very important user of
WebIDs with many deployed systems and apps. Changes would need to empirically work out how it chimes
with what is deployed there.

Henry

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2022 06:55:00 UTC