- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:41:34 -0500
- To: public-webpayments@w3.org
On 02/22/2012 03:09 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote: > Great news! :) > One question: what happened to WebID support? I was about to have a > play but could see any slot for authenticating and generating my > account using my WebID . There are two forms of WebID that we looked at - the first was WebID for login, the second was WebID for cross-site authentication. We are not going to support the first, at least, not in the near future. This is due to lack of good browser support - the UX is fairly terrible across all the browsers. Our company had proposed a non-native mechanism for browser-based WebID[1], but the WebID community decided to not take that route. WebID does not have any champions inside of the browser vendors. Additionally, BrowserID has been proposed in its place with significant backing by Mozilla[2]. Based on these developments, we don't believe that WebID will gain any traction in the near future (and thus the usability problem will not be fixed). The second was using something like WebID for cross-site authentication, and that's where the Web Keys[3] spec comes in. Note that the demo we released has the concept of an identity: https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu The URL above will list public payment accounts as well as public key information in time (via RDFa and JSON-LD). So, the concepts that survived from WebID include: * An IRI for an identity * Public keys listed at that identity * An IRI for each public key * A link from the public key back to the identity that owns it This is enough to support a Web-based PKI scheme, which we will detail more in the Web Keys specification, as time permits. This information could be associated with a WebID, or it could be associated with a BrowserID... we're going to stay agnostic on which technology will end up being adopted into the browser in the end. Right now, BrowserID has a much better UX story... and from what I read, it's meant to be decentralized in time. -- manu [1] http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/08/07/webid/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/about/ [3] http://payswarm.com/specs/ED/web-keys/2012-01-23/ -- Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny) Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact Shootout http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/
Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 04:42:05 UTC