kicks
kicks
After looking at TBL’s ‘Solid’ for several hours—I don’t follow. It is a ‘personal data store’—but it seems awfully complex. I was playing with making a static, read-only data store: well, there are a lot of strange tags involved. And many of the apps seem to use WebId-TLS (which doesn’... www.kickscondor.com
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manton
manton

@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).

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kicks
kicks

@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.

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In reply to
manton
manton

@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.

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kicks
kicks

@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.

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manton
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.

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gerwitz
gerwitz

@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.

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manton
manton

@gerwitz Thank you.

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mandaris
mandaris

@manton @kicks where do I go to learn about this SOLID that everyone is talking about?

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manton
manton

@mandaris The main web site for Solid is here.

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