Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> I sure hope that "things", unlike many phones, really end up
> downloading these often. There being a cache sharing opportunity,
> though, assumes that the "things" on a given network would be
> homogenous enough for the same software updates to be applicable to
> multiple "things".
> 

This discussion has fallen into the trap of assuming that HTTP
intermediaries are caches. In reality, devices and middleware exist
which do all sorts of things for end-users. I can imagine plenty of
applications where these same sorts of things are done for Things as
well, provided the ecosystem allows for it.

Calling it two different ecosystems is interesting, inasmuch as it's a
political distinction with no technological basis.

> 
> Do developers of package management tools like apt-get think the tools
> are part of "the Web" if they use HTTP?
> 

What about HTML interfaces for apt-get using a browser?

Once upon a time, my way of doing things *was* "on the Web", in that
content served as application/xhtml+xml would reliably engage XSLT 1.1
in browsers, while avoiding intermediaries injecting content into text/
html. XSLT-to-HTML remains a viable approach for implementing a GUI on
any package management system using XML for manifests, etc.

Browser-resident transformation remains a relevant architecture for
intranet applications. Michael Kay's XSLT 2 plugin may be used to cache
compiled transformations which convert an XForms UI into HTML5+JS+CSS.
There's no reason browsers can't natively support this approach even
better than they used to, like by supporting streaming XSLT2.

My what a tangled Web we weave, when we attempt to redefine "Web" to
exclude RESTful, transformable, XML-driven architectures running in
browsers, because they're behind a firewall and require plugins; when
that reality came about through abitrary choice.

>
> Anyway, I think it would be a mistake to scope this TAG finding to
> cover "everything addressable by a URL" or "everything that uses
> HTTP". Such a broad scope would import enough special interests to
> limit what can be definitively said. I think it's more useful to say
> something more confident/definitive about the Web (or "the browsable
> Web" for those who believe in more expansive definitions of "the Web")
> than to say something more vague about "everything addressable by a
> URL" or "everything that uses HTTP".
> 

The problem with that small-tent Web, is it bulk-excludes stakeholders
from the decisions made within. Perhaps the scope of findings should
cover the scope of those affected by said findings.

Didn't TAG findings used to be scoped to an architectural definition of
the Web? Seems much less convoluted than continually re-defining "Web"
to exclude not only more and more stakeholders, but also more and more
alternative implementations which are copacetic with commonly held
notions of "Web" and "browser". Roy called it "suppressing originality".

Tongue firmly in cheek, I believe w3c should delegate the definition of
"Web" to WHATWG where it will become a "living" standard basically
stating, "whatever those with the greatest market share need it to mean
at any given moment, to validate the decisions of informed editors
everywhere".

-Eric

Received on Monday, 19 January 2015 22:23:19 UTC