Re: WebID-ISSUE-10 (bblfish): Hash URLs for Agents [ontologies]

On 30 Jan 2011, at 01:32, WebID Incubator Group Issue Tracker wrote:

> On 29 Jan 2011, at 21:04, Peter Williams wrote in the archived mail
> http://www.w3.org/mid/SNT143-w25D1D87B1A483EF3B8536E92E00@phx.gbl
> 
> What I really liked about the use of RDFa in the FOAF+SSL pre-incubator world was that the good ol' home page could easily be foaf card, and thus the home page URI is a webid stem. To the average punter (who will rarely understand the significance of #tag on the end), the home page URI is a webid.

For people who are just joining consider the graph here:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/ED-spec-20110121/#publishing-the-webid-profile-document

You will see that the web page has a different URL to the person. That is because you can
ask the question of how many characters are on the Profile Page, but it won't make sense
to ask how many characters are on Joe, and even if it does, the answer will usually 
be different. So logically there are good reason to have different URLs for each.
If you give the same names to two things you can get a lot of confusion [ anybody a link to 
a comedy sketch that makes use of such a situation? ] And in fact in the semweb where
things are defined precisely you can prove that this is wrong.

 Some points to notice:
- The end user, mom and pops, won't ever see a WebID. It will be hidden in a certificate. If they see anything it will be a home page.
- The WebID server logic will be mostly hidden in libraries

So the only person this could be an issue with is the producer of the RDF.
If the RDF is generated automatically, then this won't be such a problem,
which is why RDF/XML and Turtle (please all learn turtle) have a long life
in front of them.

So the issue then is with the html developer. I think he can be taught. If he
does not do it right, it won't be a disaster immediately. One day it could
make his life awkward...

> The is no way in a million years I'll get even 2 realtors to ever use the foaf-generator sites and tools listed on the wiki. Getting them to add a paragraph of special html markup interspersed with normal paragraph form...is quite  feasible. Its a template, and we can give it to them.

We should improve the documentation as stated. I think WebID test suite will help.
Realtors seem unlikely to me to be building their own solution to this. My guess
is that they will buy some solution. That solution will help them do the right thing
easily.

> This RDFa argument for foaf cards mattered to me. It was like the "add sound file to mosaic browser" moment, succesfully dumbing down stuff for the mass of folk without prevent the technical standards doing their thing, just as the experts here define.


How did it matter to you other than in a theoretical way? As I pointed out
people can make mistakes, that won't break things immediately. But since we know
the best way to do things right, we might as well specify it. People will make their
mistakes whatever we do, but they won't be able to blame us.

People have managed to use the web and not understand the basics of how it works.
It just cost them over time. Imagine a news site that changes the URLs to its
articles. Doing that will break all incoming links, discouraging people to point
to them, and so reducing their long term value. There are many other examples. 
The W3C architecture group produces some fine documents whose authoritative power
lies not in the force of human law - nobody will stop anyone building their
broken web site with missing links all over the place - but in the value to the
user of doing things the right way

  worth reading btw: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
 

Henry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Sunday, 30 January 2011 00:54:03 UTC