Re: Observations on WebID definition and specification

Hello Martynas,

Speaking personally and not as the chair, I think yours is an interesting proposal worth thinking about.

Practically speaking, though, I’m afraid of what it implies. If I am right, and please correct me if I am not, having no media type requirement whatsoever would imply that both servers and clients would have to be compatible with at least the top 3 - 4 serialization formats in order for any WebID spec to actually achieve widespread adoption. As of today, that would likely be RDFa, Turtle and JSON-LD (and possibly data islands), along with ConNeg (and possibly signposting).

On one side, I do agree that orthogonality would be a good thing. On the other side, the implications in terms of complexity are very significant, at least at first glance. I should note that complexity, in this case, primarily refers to dependencies. I don’t think anyone would spend time crafting new parsers from scratch.

However... One way to frame your proposal would be in the context of the natural tendency of a software ecosystem to converge. In that sense, if we were to drop all media type requirements I would expect the ecosystem to quickly converge towards JSON-LD + Turtle (which is practically already the case) and then progress towards JSON-LD alone. Looking at it in this way, I would agree that yours is the best way forward.

As chair, I’m aware of others with perfectly legitimate implementability concerns, which is why current consensus lies with a MUST on Turtle and JSON-LD. Perhaps working on examples might manage to change a few minds. 

Best,
Jacopo.

Received on Monday, 5 February 2024 13:10:52 UTC