Re: Unblocking WebID CG work items

Thanks, Nathan, 

 your answer shows why you would be a good chair :-) 


> On 10. Jul 2023, at 19:07, Nathan Rixham <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
> 
> Under normal circumstances I would agree, and happily co-chair, however as previously mentioned, there's a huge elephant in the room.
> 
> 1) Dereference to turtle or json-ld
> - consumer must support both
> 
> 2) Dereference to turtle and json-ld
> - publisher must support conneg
> 
> Both of these cases may need punted to the solid wg, where it becomes a child of an infrastructure which already requires one of these things.

yes, we have groups pulling in these two different directions. 
We could get a consensus I think on whatever the LDP consensus 
was. I think that means the server must support both with content-negotiation.
That seems to be also what the Solid spec says.
https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol#resource-representations

I could see that to be worth trying as a PR that could then be sent to the larger
Community.

But is it worth us working on this now when a WG will set up 
the procedures to come to a consensus on this with a much wider 
Community?  

Well, whoever makes the PR can decide that.

> 
> IMHO WebID as it stands cannot be implemented, and already agreed decisions mean it cannot be adopted in the future in all but edge cases - so I personally see no way of progressing any specification, unless either:
> a) a superset specification was designed, which essentially says any <uri> which dereference to an RDF response that asserts <uri> a :Agent (where :Agent is a well specified class in a published ontology) w/ note MAY 303 to handle range-14, or
> b) a subset specification was designed, as above but constrained to a single media type json(-ld)
> 
> For such a broad term, it may need to be (a), however that would be entailed by any document solid produces, where the list of types is any it currently supports / are rec's.

Yes, we need some consensus on vocabularies.
We initially had that with the foaf ontology and the cert ontology for webid-tls.

Now the https://github.com/solid/webid-profile group is working on that.
Again I think this is very much application-dependent. So for HTTP signatures
the security vocabulary that is now a standard is the default choice (Rather than
the cert ontology of years ago).

We should only update the spec on that when we are very sure what the 
consensus is. 

> My personal opinion would be either to let it just move to solid and kill this group, or take some consensus to scrap the current specification, and produce (a) + (b) above, where (a) is deferred to by solid and anything else implementing webid, and (b) is a subset which allows parties to produce a very specific set of tooling, webid implementations that are only json-ld.
> 
> To move the group to a position where we end up in an eternal conversation about 1+2 above, where both limit deployability to some fraction of a percentage, or keep as is constrained by MUST turtle, along with the no definition of an :Agent which can be subclassed, would not be something I'd want to encourage or facilitate.

I can see (b) as a good option, but we would need consensus on the vocabularies to
use, and without a WG process, I don’t see we can reach that point. 

As you show, the decisions we need to make are not due to a lack of desire to choose, 
but instead that the choices need to be placed within a larger framework
so that they can find better justifications and more support. 
Without that larger framework, any option will feel arbitrary.

> 
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 5:29 PM Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net <mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 10. Jul 2023, at 18:01, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com <mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> Additionally, it has been observed that the responsiveness of the current chair has been inconsistent, sometimes spanning weeks, months, or even longer.
>>> 
>> 
>> yes, your whole argument rests on an evident falsehood, which is easy to verify by 
>> just looking at the github issue repository
>> https://github.com/w3c/WebID/pulls?q=is%3Apr
>> 
>> I pointed that out in the e-mail you just responded to, but you somehow decided
>> to repeat the falsehood again. 
>> 
>> Here’s a picture for the archives, showing that all but one issue passed. One was closed
>> by the author after criticism.
>> <Screenshot 2023-07-10 at 18.10.21.png>
>> 
>> I am ok with adding a new chair, but perhaps we should choose someone who has experience implementing WebID, Solid, and working on the relevant specs. Perhaps someone like
>> Nathan who was active when we were on the foaf+ssl mailing list and people were friendly 
>> and discussions were constructive.
>> 
>>  https://markmail.org/thread/xywxnqp3adqcem5f
>> 
>> Sarven could also co-chair… 
>> 
>> Henry
>> 
>>