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

[Sarven Capadisli]

On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 19:28 -0400, 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.
> 
> -- manu
> 

I am in full agreement with the intentions. However, I think the spec
should stay neutral about the required RDF serialization(s).

I don't see why there must be a tight connection between the required
serialization format and helping people understand, implement and use
WebID. Instead of setting limitations at the implementation level, I
think we should lead the implementers of the WebID spec towards human
readable (visible) formats by showing (XHTML+RDFA) code examples and
diagrams, having them plug their WebID into their browser, showing them
a Web page, and so on. A section on Recommendations might even be super
useful.

In any case, if we must pick a required serialization, I am indeed all
for XHTML+RDFa.

Just my two bitcoins =)

-Sarven