Re: Low power devices (was: webid serializations consensus 2023)

I feel I should clarify a few points.

> Im saying that it's been embraced, used, and widely adopted already.  Schema.org is used in billions of pages.  It's not niche, it's so matinstream, that it's the de-facto semantic web, right now
> 
> But it IS JSON-LD.  And that is missing from the webid spec.  And if we dont add it in, it might not make it to the final draft. 

By “niche” I was referring to my use case at the crossroad of corporate and IoT, not to JSON-LD. I agree that the latter is clearly not niche, I should have phrased it better.

Let me try to separate the two (adjacent) topics. On one side, I have reservations when it comes to using JSON-LD with low-power devices, due to its complexity, and in contexts where retrieval of external resources might not be allowed, due to the fact that a compliant parser needs to be able to retrieve contexts. The only way around this would be to mandate the use of a subset of JSON-LD.

On the other side there’s the relationship between JSON-LD and WebID. I would _prefer_ for WebID to not mandate (as in MUST) JSON-LD but merely suggest it or simply remain neutral on the topic of serialization format. I think doing so would open up the spec to a broader variety of use cases. That said, I agree that JSON-LD is becoming the de-facto RDF serialization format and any spec in the realm of LD / RDF must be compatible with it (at minimum).

I can only see two ways to reconcile these: 

1. either WebID chooses not to mandate JSON-LD (as in MUST); or 
2. WebID chooses to primarily (although not exclusively, of course) target use cases where computational power and network access are non-issues to prioritize JSON-LD compat. I would not like this, of course, but I would understand the reasoning behind it.

Note that I’m not taking into consideration options like mandating context inlining as that would reduce compat. with the wider JSON-LD ecosystem, which I would find worse than not supporting JSON at all.

Obviously all this is my personal view on things. I hope I have managed to explain myself better!

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2023 16:16:27 UTC