Edgar,
First off let me mention that I found this
http://tyaga.org/prowl/obs_sequence.php and this
http://tyaga.org/prowl/prowl_doc.php to be heplful for anyone that may have missed them.
I hope I don't screw this up but I'm going to mirror some of your comments back to you before I reply on each one, please do let me know if I misunderstood.
I think you said..
1. It would be good if the format had both ends of any transaction clearly stated in the record
2. It would be good if the format was such that the transaction record was basically identical, no matter where hosted
Both of these things sound like worth doing to me. As you say, it will make processing and checking of records a whole bunch easier and I think that's a worthy goal in itself. I guess that both of these points are format specific but lets just say that it makes sense that the canonical format should have this feature. That way harvesters could just charge around the net and harvest records as pure text, dump them somewhere else, and process later (amongst other advantages).
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I think you said
3. We should distinguish between three stages
- 1 - information whilst it is being transmitted from end users to their 'accounting system' or currency provider
- 2 - information being published by currency providers/accounting systems (presumably for open auditing purposes)
- 3 - aggregated data (tallies and such) that might be the result of such auditing procedures
4. Furthermore that the focus of our attention should be on creating a standard for 2 rather than the former or latter.
Well, OK yes, this sounds reasonable, certainly at first this is the kind of use case I think such a standard would be built for.
However whilst I agree it makes sense to concentrate on this as the first thing to handle (and yes the part I'd be most interested in getting right) I don't think that precludes, for example the format defined for 2 being used for the 1 use case, or at least something similar. Clearly that would be up to individual implementers to decide.
At this early stage I would feel uncomfortable completely excluding the 1st use case from this proto-standard we are working on but yes OK I do agree that it makes sense, to concentrate on the second situation as the focus at least at first.
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This raises a question are we talking about creating a standard here? Gulliame you said that you are following the 'microformat process' Do you mean per the discussion here:
http://microformats.org/wiki/process that sounds great to me. I'd be keen that we should do that if only to get a better consistency of what exactly we are doing. ISO or W3C would be waaaaaaayyy too hard for what we want to do right now.
Edgar since PROWL is all about publishing stuff on web sites/blogs it does seem to me that POSH is a fairly good fit for what you want to do with Prowl, but then again I might be wrong. Don't want to get into a religious discussion about formats per se.
Edgar have a read of the pricinciples.. do they look attractive to you?
http://microformats.org/wiki/principles We should also wonder to what extent we are doing would (even potentially) overlap with rel-payment
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-paymentI dont think so - if anything just because rel-payment is about facilitating something like the 1 use case rather than 2.
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Couple more things...
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Maybe a glossary of key terms is something we should do if only for discussion amongst ourselves. My feeling is that we should err on the side of easily understood-at-first-though-sometimes-not-strictly-accurate terminology rather than generic-and-therefore-accurate-but-hard-to-follow words like 'parameter'.
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My eyebrows were raised a little at the mention of "#some_id" because of course that is going to be "hard" to synchronize at both ends of a transaction. "hard" is something of an understatement. From your other discussions on the net it appears this is more about binding together two related transactions together which makes sense. Some system where by unique ids (in a given name space) can be proposed on one end and then accepted on the other end might work, but of course it is complicated so probably deserves some more discussion.
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A related issue is how we are suggesting to establish identity of accounting 'end points'. URL like subject identifiers (with, possibly an ability to 'alias' short names to these longer ids) sound like a good way to do that, but its a tricky question of course, especially when things like 'shared accounts' and such might come up. Or is it?
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If we did create a microformat what would it be called?
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Personally I'm very interested in the 'extending a line of credit' side of things that is per the kind of thing that Ripple pay does. Another way to look at that is to note that everytime someone 'joins' twollars (and when exactly do they do that?) the total number of twollars in existence goes up by another 50.
We can all see a thousand deficiencies with twollars as a currency system, but that is one - the potential or real devaluation of all twollars by the fact that anyone can join twitter (or join Twollars) and create 50 more of them. I think this is also a very important consideration when trying to evalute the relative health or unhealth of a currency issuing authority eg a local exchange trading system - that is how many of their 'dollars' are in existence or in potential existence at that time.
Of course the difference between 'actual' twollars (as given or spent) and 'potential' twollars - as created at the time of extending a line of credit - is an important and tricky question of semantics.
But rather than being a question of semantics I'd liek to see, at least at some point down the line any such standard as this able to be extended to include 'publication' of 'credit limits' or 'line sof credit' or 'potential curency' in existence at that time.
Am I way off base?
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Wish you all the best. Sorry that I must shoot through now and pick up my kids from school
Look forward to checking in again in coming days.
THanks
Miles
http://milo.graytime.org