Re: W3C position on URIs http:// vs. https://

On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 at 00:38, Nathan Rixham <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

> I'd argue that if schema's were used and dereferenced often, this would
> already all be solved many years ago.
>

Quite. RDF is in many ways close to something that would in other settings
be called “schema less”. By having a solid general pattern for data, and
reassurances about computing with partial information, you can get many
tasks done without fetching any RDFS. There is still value in *having* a
design, but the design is used up from rather than consulted at runtime.
OWL can also be seen from this perspective— as a kind of super fancy
“javadoc” used to bring some order and discipline to the documentation of
graph data.

When using RDF in the wild it almost always needs tidying up, filtering,
cleaning, normalizing before use in serious applications. Within those
steps, tidying up a few http: -> https mappings is amongst the most trivial
of challenges.

The reason btw Schema.org serves the same json-ld context with/without TLS
is that we never wanted our adoption of JSON-LD to accidentally turn the
site into a piece of critical software infrastructure. It is now totally
statically served, including that context file. If JSON-LD had a thing we
could put in there to express a migration intent from http to https so that
willing modern parsers could be nudged towards https triples, that could be
worth exploring.

Cheers,

Dan



>
> more common schema's like rdfs, schema.org and the like, would be
> receiving tens of thousands of requests per second, likely far higher, have
> mirrors all over the place, methods to consider a document from url a as
> url b in place, integrity checks, versions, long caches, and all the
> solutions widely implemented and available for things which are heavily
> utilized around the web.
>
> could you even transclude a foreign http schema, in a browser, from a
> document elsewhere served over https without it being blocked or a load of
> console error messages?
>
> The elephant in the room here, is that schema's are hardly ever utilized,
> or deferenced. Yes somebody will be doing it, some of you, but it's
> certainly not being done at scale at web level. If it was, this wouldn't be
> a discussion in 2023.
>