RE: ftp scheme

I don't  care which non https scheme is chosen. It's *any* that goes beyond
the presumptions of the very pure web architecture, and shows we can deal
with the cruddy web (out there), as the platform goes mainstream. It has to
support an economy 1 - 10 years in development, so the initial adoption
grows - just like certs grew from Wells Fargo... to Visa... to 250,000
fortezza cards in DoD, to almost every e-commerce server on the web.... to 3
million cert-based smartcards for US soldiers, ... to self-signed certs
inWIF, ... to US national id plan....

It's like a VC test, of a business funding plan. You can smell which
technologies are primed as being infrastructure relevant, should the exec
team make such claims. The multi-protocol'ness is one of those tests, as
this property stresses the prototypes and the rationales for
prototying-phase folks spending time (or not). Often, the team claims a
global property as a sales hook, but the technology shows niche properties,
still. You don't fund it, and just wait a few more years.


-----Original Message-----
From: public-xg-webid-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-webid-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Nathan
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 8:58 AM
To: Henry Story
Cc: peter williams; public-xg-webid@w3.org
Subject: Re: ftp scheme

Henry Story wrote:
> On 19 Apr 2011, at 16:44, peter williams wrote:
> 
>> Forgive me, I will not be attending any Berlin meeting. And Im not 
>> writing anything for the US one - since it will be auto-rejected 
>> based on the name of the author, alone. My positions on user-centric 
>> identity are generally not welcome, in those circles.
>>
>> I'm happy with ftps (since it's an interesting two channel problem, 
>> and doesn't have redirect or cookie issues). What matters to me is 
>> demonstrating that we don't repeat history. If that means looking for 
>> theme #51, and then
>> #52 then I will do so (for what matters is shaping the general form 
>> of the movement, for mass adoption that makes those who do muti-year 
>> platform engineering believing that the movement has built in 
>> "sustainability"). If we don't want suggestion #53, lets do what we 
>> said - and show ftps, as a non http scheme.
> 
> I am happy with ftp and ftps schemes because they are easy to implement
with what we have now. 
> (Ie: It does not mean implementing new parsers, redirect schemes, 
> transforms, as webfinger would for example)
> 
> As you say ftp urls lack content negotiation, which means of course a
small but interesting problem. The receiver will have to do content
inspection just for that to guess what the format is. 

[snip]

Okay, sorry in advance, but why? I'd really encourage everybody to seriously
not waste there time on this, unless ofcourse you want people to webid auth
via FTP to upload some files (rather than have an ftp:// scheme webid). This
is just doing things for the sake of it, to prove some point that /really/
doesn't need made.

Most people use HTTP and HTTP+TLS, if we want to push further than that,
then the next stops are things people actually use daily, like webfinger,
using *+ssh, scp, wss (secure websockets), perhaps some torrent/p2p work,
looking at oauth2 flows or integration and so forth on the
transfer/transport protocol side.

On the other side then looking at microformats, json, and things like
activity streams, poco, salmon and so forth would be useful.

But really, ftps:// webid's? come on now.

Best,

Nathan

Received on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 16:34:36 UTC