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

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
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> On 10 October 2013 19:48, Will Norris <will@willnorris.com> wrote:
>
>> There irony here is that WebFinger itself was created to solve the
>> problem of resolving an otherwise unresolvable URI (originally mailto and
>> later acct URIs).  URNs have the same problem, and since they have no
>> well-defined host, you can't even use WebFinger to resolve them.  I know
>> there have been some efforts to define URN resolution (rfc2483 et al), but
>> as far as I know none are very well adopted.  Using HTTP URIs makes the
>> most sense to me.
>>
>> But do we really need yet another registry of properties, the vast
>> majority of which I'm sure have been defined in a dozen other places?  Is
>> there a reason why reusing one of these existing namespaces would not work?
>>  (and if something WebFinger specific really is desirable, then we can
>> continue using webfinger.net, which has already been used for
>> http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar/ and
>> http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page/.  That was kind of the idea of
>> running it as a static site out of the GitHub "webfinger" org; it's very
>> easy to give others access to everything.  That's what we've done with
>> activitystrea.ms for several years now)
>>
>
> +1
>
> Yes, that's nice but Id suggest it's better to put all the terms in one
> single file to reduce multiple HTTP GETs and maintenance.
>

multiple GETs by whom?  I suspect that these will typically resolve to
human readable descriptions of the properties... I don't imagine they'd be
automatically fetched by anything/anyone.  We could of course embed some
machine readable version of the property in the pages, but even then I'm
not exactly sure what the use-case would be.  That said, I don't actually
have strong feelings on this.

>
> Also I forgot to mention VCard which also covers a lot of terms needed.
>

yep, though I'm not sure if they have URI equivalents for property names.
 There is a URN for the XML namespace (urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:vcard-4.0),
but that's gets us back to where we started.

>
>
>>
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>> On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 8:16 AM, Paul E. Jones <paulej@packetizer.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, any URI can be used to identify a property. However, there has to
>>> be some agreed scheme and structure for things defined in the IETF. The
>>> point of the suggestion was to specify that.
>>>
>>> We could use HTTP, but I've never seen that scheme used in IETF
>>> documents for this type of thing. I've seen URNs, though.
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>> *From:* Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
>>> *Sent:* Sun Oct 06 09:19:42 EDT 2013
>>> *To:* "Paul E. Jones" <paulej@packetizer.com>
>>> *Cc:* webfinger <webfinger@ietf.org>
>>> *Subject:* Re: [webfinger] Registration of a URN for WebFinger
>>> Properties
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5 October 2013 03:22, Paul E. Jones <paulej@packetizer.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Folks,
>>>>
>>>> As you know, properties (both link and subject-specific properties) are
>>>> identified via a URI.  For applications that are defined outside the IETF,
>>>> those organizations are able to define any URI they wish to use.  For any
>>>> we might define within the IETF, however, we need something.
>>>>
>>>> In anticipation of having such a need, I think we should create a
>>>> document along the lines of RFC 6755 for WebFinger.  Specifically, we would
>>>> define a URN sub-namespace as:
>>>>
>>>>    urn:ietf:params:webfinger
>>>>
>>>> One such potentially-useful subject-specific properties are "name",
>>>> which would be the the subject's name intended for human consumption.  If
>>>> you've queried my WebFinger server, you would know I currently advertise my
>>>> name in English and Chinese.  For the "default" name, the URN might be:
>>>>
>>>>    urn:ietf:params:webfinger:name
>>>>
>>>> For language-specific variants, it might be:
>>>>
>>>>     urn:ietf:params:webfinger:name:zh-CN
>>>>
>>>> Defining the various properties and their meaning is an exercise for
>>>> another day, but I hope you see the value in defining the URN sub-namespace.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Cant this be done using traditional HTTP keys.  The advantage being that
>>> they can be systematically dereferenced using http GET, rather than having
>>> to look it up in a central registry in a non machine readable way.  This is
>>> what has been going on for 10+ years, with FOAF, schema.org, open graph
>>> protocol and others.  Have I missed something?
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?
>>>>
>>>> Paul
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>
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