@kicks I'm skeptical of such complicated specs ever being widely adopted. It would take a very popular real-world app to push it forward (like Mastodon did for ActivityPub, which I also think could be much simpler).
@manton Well, we’ve been through this before: XML-RPC vs. REST+JSON. And no one remembers SOAP—which had tremendous backing, but was just so riddled with tags, you would just get lost in the stack. ActivityPub is just unbelievable—so many layers of JSON-LD, Webfinger, Salmon. Webmentions seem so much simpler—even though they’re not exactly comparable. However, Microformats are very difficult. They just are messy in practice—don’t you think? I kind of wish we could go with a combination of Webmentions and JSON Feed. But it’s too late to go inventing another spec.
@kicks Agreed, especially about the layers of JSON-LD that (I think) burden these new formats. Remembering SOAP, I searched my blog archives and found this post from 2003. I might have written it differently today, but pretty much still holds up 15 years later.
@manton What an astounding post—this feels like the situation today. (And sure enough—FOAF, XML-RPC and SOAP all went their way.) It is pretty surprising that Microformats have somewhat survived—the u- and p- prefixes, figuring out how to nest elements, complex rules like you see on the Indieweb authorship page. I wonder what drives the complexity of something like ActivityPub. Is it a kind of premature future-proofing? Is it just a desire to load the thing with features? I especially wonder about something like FOAF, which should be conceptually simple. Really appreciate the conversation, Manton.
@kicks I think part of the complexity comes from a desire to solve all the problems. I drafted a related post last week after looking over Solid, but it's a little negative... Need to re-read and decide whether to post it.
@manton this thought deserves to be expanded.
Micro.blog is a great case study in standard adoption driven by solving one small problem at a time.
