Re: [webfinger] Registration of a URN for WebFinger Properties

["Paul E. Jones" <[e-mail]>]

Melvin,

See comments below:

On 10/11/2013 11:01 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>     I agree, though none of these are designed for use in WebFinger. 
>     So, I created my own.  You can't point to something 5 years old
>     and declare I'm reproducing it because there is some syntax
>     scribbling that has the word "name" associated with it.
>     What I defined in the link above for "name", for example, is
>     somewhere between foaf:name and the one related to vcard. 
>     WebFinger has a registry for identifiers now.  It would be good to
>     see that get populated with useful items, though I would not
>     recommend putting everything one might possibly put into a vcard
>     in there.  If a vcard is essential, the vcard link relation should
>     be published in a WF JRD and a client query that.  However, there
>     are basic things like "name" that are very useful, such as when
>     you log into a web site and that site would like to display
>     your avatar and name.  The avatar already has a defined LR value
>     under webfinger.org <http://webfinger.org>. The person's name does
>     not have a defined property identifier anywhere, except the one I
>     specified under packetizer.com <http://packetizer.com>.
>
>
> Ah I see what you've done, you've added some internationalization, ie 
> one URI for each language?  Apart from that are there any differences 
> to FOAF (by the way FOAF already has standards for internationalization)
>
> Wouldnt this lead to potentially dozens of new URIs, per term, for 
> example, for a different one for every language supported?

FOAF does not define a set of URI.  Rather, it's XML-based markup. 
WebFinger uses URIs as identifiers.  I don't really care where those 
identifiers are defined, but at present there is no standard property 
identifer in URI form that means "name".

Using the URI fragment to indicate the language does introduce a number 
of distinct URIs, but having the language tag would need to be 
/somewhere/ if we want to allow the language to be specified as part of 
the property.  Unlike XML, we do not have additional attributes we can 
apply.  Arguably, we do not need to specify the language and we allow a 
user to advertise just a single name.  However, I've found it beneficial 
to allow people to advertise names in at least two different character 
sets.  I can't read Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, for example, so 
allowing a western alphabet is helpful to be used in parallel with the 
native alphabet is nice.

Paul