Choosing Standards
Julian Bond
This was even in the original FAQ. The solution is simple; support both.
XFN and/or FOAF for contact lists
Tricky. XFN has some limitations in that it's hard to represent complex
structures such as "I know this person with this name and this property"
(I may be wrong about this). And there are several other possible
standards developing. Particularly OpenSocial but there are others.
uF and/or FOAF for profiles
FOAF has a big advantage that it's extendible and structured. However
it's RDF and not always easy to parse. But then microformats are not
exactly easy to parse either. Again there are competing standards;
Opensocial again.
XRDS and/or Link meta.
There are existing auto-discovery standards that are not going away any
time soon. But then neither is XRDS. And I think there's still some
unanswered questions about how to discover the key pages marked up with
microformats. Spidering a whole site to find the page with my contact
lists doesn't feel like a solution to me.
OpenID and/or Cardspace
OpenID has the momentum. Cardspace has the industrial strength.
oAuth, AuthSub, BBAuth, Facebook, MS Delegated Auth, Proprietary
standards
This looks easy in that oAuth is the only one that's really open. But
others and the proprietary approaches aren't going away either.
Are there any other places where the DP choice isn't completely clear
cut?
--
Julian Bond E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ skype:julian.bond?chat
Contains Flammable Gas Under Pressure
Aaron Cheung
> Are there any other places where the DP choice isn't completely clear cut?
a) is APML a DP choice?
b) is OPML a DP choice?
c) is XMPP a DP choice?
(being all on the site's wiki frontpage)
Btw, may I suggest to put the FAQ textlink onto the wiki frontpage..
Regards,
Aaron.
Christian Scholz / Tao Takashi (SL)
Thanks for listing those, Julian!
I wonder if we should set some criterias for choosing them. For me that would be
- adoption
- open standard (e.g. not supernetwork.com's cool profile format)
As for OpenSocial I am not too much into it. How would this be used
then? I know there is a REST API but
isn't that more supposed to be used from those Shindig which then maps
that to JS structures?
And if I understood Kevin Marks correctly, it seems that the aim seems
to be more (right now) that apps
go to the data, not data to the apps.
As for what we list I would propose to say we list 1-2 which
definitely need to be supported (better is one of course)
and a list of optional ones you can support additionally (mainly in
reading I would think).
-- Christian
--
Christian Scholz
Tao Takashi (Second Life name)
taota...@gmail.com
Blog/Podcast: http://mrtopf.de/blog
Planet: http://worldofsl.com
Company: http://comlounge.net
Tech Video Blog: http://comlounge.tv
IRC: MrTopf/Tao_T
Julian Bond
>a) is APML a DP choice?
>b) is OPML a DP choice?
Horrible, horrible, non-standard. But it does have very wide adoption
and gets the job done in specific circumstances.
>c) is XMPP a DP choice?
>(being all on the site's wiki frontpage)
Don't talk to me about Instant Message standards, I'm a Skype man! XMPP
got a huge shot in the arm from GTalk but I don't see Google doing all
that much with it. And IM these days is voice and video as well.
Julian Bond
14 May 2008 00:19:35
>As for OpenSocial I am not too much into it. How would this be used
>then? I know there is a REST API but
>isn't that more supposed to be used from those Shindig which then maps
>that to JS structures?
>And if I understood Kevin Marks correctly, it seems that the aim seems
>to be more (right now) that apps
>go to the data, not data to the apps.
The REST part of it is critical to DP if it gets adoption. The Gadget
part of it is a diversion that probably works against DP. At the moment
I'm thinking of the REST API as maybe becoming an open, widely adopted
Twitter API. It does at least use OpenID and oAuth.
>As for what we list I would propose to say we list 1-2 which
>definitely need to be supported (better is one of course)
>and a list of optional ones you can support additionally (mainly in
>reading I would think).
There's listing supported standards and then there's trying to come up
with Best Practice documents that recommend how to use them. And I've
highlighted things like the RSS/Atom, XFN/Foaf, XRDS/Link issues because
the BP documents are going to have to recommend both at the same time.
Aaron Cheung
> New idea. No competition.
ok so it's a DP choice, per its being on the wiki frontpage, with or without adoption
(i did note that there were at least a few adoptions), and nobody so far says no..
>>b) is OPML a DP choice?
> Horrible, horrible, non-standard. But it does have very wide adoption
> and gets the job done in specific circumstances.
ok so it's a DP choice, per its being on the wiki frontpage, because of wide adoption
>>c) is XMPP a DP choice?
>>(being all on the site's wiki frontpage)
> Don't talk to me about Instant Message standards, I'm a Skype man! XMPP
> got a huge shot in the arm from GTalk but I don't see Google doing all
> that much with it. And IM these days is voice and video as well.
Facebook alledgedly looking at XMPP... which i recall a few years back were
adding voice and video extension specs?.. anyway, so it's a DP choice, on our wiki
frontpage.
Re OpenID/Cardspace.. what about SAML? Google alledgedly have apps using it..
and what about i-Names? are they DP choices?
And what about OOXML (if Cardspace qualifies for SSO), and OpenDocument?
are they DP choices?
Regards,
Aaron.
Aaron Cheung
OpenSocial is not perfect, nor is OpenID.. but at least Google and Yahoo
and MySpace behind it (re OpenSocial)..
It's more like the case for SPARQL for RDF queries.. if not SPARQL,
what else?.. same token, if not OpenSocial, what other choices are available?
Regards,
Aaron.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Bond" <julia...@voidstar.com>
To: <dataportability...@googlegroups.com>
Christian Scholz (mrtopf.de)
http://wiki.dataportability.org/display/dpmain/Process+-+How+to+select+standards
-- Christian