[foaf-protocols] First WebID Teleconference minutes (July 27th 2010)

[Nathan]

Manu Sporny wrote:
> On 08/02/2010 08:50 AM, Seth Russell wrote:
>> I don't know if this has been already dealt with or not, but i think it
>> is important if you intend WebIDs to be used by people.  First point of
>> information:   arn't you're giving out WebID's, hopefully short ones,
>> which people pass around in various contexts to various agents to
>> identify themselves?  Well if that is the case, then me thinks that is
>> should be **mandated** that if a person hits one of those WebID's with
>> their browser, not knowing anything about content negoition, that the
>> WewID URL will respond with a profile in a human friendly way.   But
>> gentelmen, i don't think that is what is happening now.   Some respond
>> back in XML ... others in JSON ... very few of your WebId respond back
>> with a page which an actually person would want to read.   So is it
>> possible that you guys will consider actually putting that mandate in
>> the specification?  
> 
> Seth,
> 
> I agree with you at a high level. I think it's important for WebID URLs
> to be human readable. We don't need it for interoperability, but it will
> certainly help when explaining that "a WebID is just a web page" to
> those new to the concept.
> 
> We must make sure that we don't get too wrapped up in the technical
> details to understand the human problem that we're trying to solve. We
> need a clear way to communicate the concept of WebID to non-technical
> folks.
> 
> If we can say, "just plug your WebID into your browser and you'll be
> able to see the WebID description", then we will have gone a long way
> towards helping people understand that WebID is a concept that they can
> grasp.
> 
> This is the reason that I think that we should just settle on XHTML+RDFa
> as the only required serialization format on both sides, but I do
> understand that there are others on here that are tied to RDF/XML for
> various reasons.

FWIW, +1 to XHTML+RDFa (preference going to RDFa in either XHTML or 
HTML(5) for future compatibility) as being the only required 
serialization - still can't think fo a good reason not to.

Best,

Nathan