#dev 2019-01-30

2019-01-30 UTC
snarfed, benwerd, benwerd_, [jgmac1106], eli_oat, nloadhol1, [schmarty], snarfed1, [asuh], KartikPrabhu, [tantek], [xavierroy], [Vincent], ichoquo0Aigh9ie, petermolnar, petermolnar_, iasai, rubenverborgh, jeremych_, [Rose] and cweiske joined the channel; mblaney and petermolnar left the channel
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cweiske grantcodes[m], if the micropub helper git repo had tags, then github would list them properly under "releases": https://github.com/grantcodes/micropub/releases
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Zegnat [metbril], probably late to the party, but if you look at https://tokens.indieauth.com/ is has an example token verification that shows the client_id you would get back
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Zegnat did wonder about sending a User-Agent string from micropub clients
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Zegnat The problem is with the spoofability, and if someone starts sending it I worry people will start to depend on it
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Zegnat (depend on it for the wrong thing, that is)
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@frankmeeuwsen ↩️ @tjarko Monocle heeft het maar heel "opinionated". Via microsub en webmentions. Meer proof of concept dan consumentenproduct (twitter.com/_/status/1090583317647372288)
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@jgmac1106 More than proof of concept: https://indieweb.org/reader#Social Readers I think microsub readers now used by many and has 1,000s of sources AND gigs and gigs of feeds. What I like I just have to use semantic HTML in my sites rather than doing everything twice for a… https://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/2019/01/30/more-than-proof-of-concept-readersocial-readers (twitter.com/_/status/1090607910923706374)
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[schmarty] got thinking this morning about a combo micropub endpoint and client that pulls together lots of disparate clients to get new things done.
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[schmarty] e.g. i like posting notes, articles, and photos with quill, but the event poster isn't what i want. also i'd like to use kapowski more for reaction GIF posts.
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[eddie] I don't quite understand why the endpoint and client should be combined?
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[schmarty] oh yeah - so you don't have to sign in to each client manually
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[schmarty] you sign into this meta-client that keeps track of your micropub endpoint and token
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[schmarty] and the meta-client lives on the web, so it can set up new micropub endpoints for you, and handle its own auth.
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[eddie] hmmm interesting
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[schmarty] an example use would be you're viewing a post you like in your browser. you hit a bookmarklet that takes you to the meta-client's reply page. there are options on there for what kind of reply, including GIF. clicking GIF takes you to Kapowski, and you're already logged in and have the reply URL populated.
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[schmarty] in the background, the meta-client had set up an endpoint and identity for you, done the indieauth dance for Kapowski, and forwarded you there already logged in (might be challenging!)
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[schmarty] when you post, Kapowski actually submits it back to the meta-client's micropub endpoint, which then forwards it on to your site's micropub endpoint.
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Zegnat Logging you in through a forward is hard. Usually that will include some sort of token exchange so Kapowski (and all other clients) needs special support for that
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[schmarty] i haven't walked through it step by step but i feel like the meta-client could make this pretty transparent to the user with a handful of redirects.
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Zegnat The forwarder idea is really nice, as it means the user will have to issue less tokens so the trust is kept small.
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[schmarty] e.g. the meta-client sets up a different "me" page for you for each client, including its own auth and token endpoints, as well as a micropub endpoint..
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Zegnat Honestly all the meta endpoint needs to be able to do is open Kapowski in such a way that it tells Kaposki to submit to endpoint A and use token X. You don’t actually need to do IndieAuth
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Zegnat Where A will be hosted by the meta endpoint, and X could be a one-time token issued by the meta client
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[schmarty] Zegnat: true! but Kapowski already implements IndieAuth, so in theory this would require no changes to the "upstream" micropub client.
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[schmarty] but that's a great point - quill supports passing some kind of session info directly (including micropub endpoint and token), so perhaps that could be standardized.
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Zegnat Don’t get me wrong, you can also definitely make an IndieAuth endpoint that involves no user interaction (I think I have code for that floating somewhere). I don’t know what would be more natural to standardise on
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[eddie] ohhh I gotcha schmarty! That makes more sense now
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[eddie] Yeah, that's very interesting
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[schmarty] from a UX/UI perspective it will probably be a weird experience and feel brittle, but i think it could make a pretty great browser extension or feature for Together or Monocle.
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Zegnat client.example.com?me=urltodiscoverendpoints vs client.example.com?mpendpoint=url&token=xxx
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Zegnat Are the two basic ways I could immediately think of for making it work
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Zegnat The first case could have the client skip the first step of asking for your URL, and immediately send you to your indieauth endpoint. (And in the case of the meta-client, it can provide an endpoint that does not require user interaction at all.)
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Zegnat Prior-art on interaction-less indieauth: https://gist.github.com/Zegnat/9d3945f9b342d9b6af5ee33476003966
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[schmarty] zegnat++ ooh neat
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Loqi zegnat has 58 karma in this channel over the last year (165 in all channels)
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Zegnat Hmm. I should update that. The listed limitation has actually been patched :D
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[jgmac1106] having an actual kapowski.com now and the important influence Baside High has had on the community going to get funnly confusing
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[jgmac1106] Bayside*
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[schmarty] [jgmac1106] it was fun while it lasted. i need to drop those and find a new naming scheme.
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[jgmac1106] Buffy?
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[schmarty] => chat
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Zegnat Hmm. I wonder why Solid/WebID requires a PersonalProfileDocument. I must still not be grasping RDF right
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Zegnat Did anyone else go down that hole yet?
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Zegnat feels like he should get petermolnar in on this
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[eddie] I haven't read up on it much, but it does seem closer to IndieWeb than Mastodon, so I think it is something to read up more on to be able to better compare contrast with IndieWeb tech
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[eddie] I've saved a couple articles on it in my reader to try to get a better understanding of it
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Zegnat Like IndieWeb they seem to be going the building-blocks route of having different specs for different things
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Zegnat But they are very RDF heavy, which I have not often been able to wrap my head around
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[eddie] I don't understand a lot of it, but I'm vaguely familiar because of when I was starting to build Mastodon/ActivityPub into my website before offloading to Bridgy Fe
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[eddie] Fed
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[eddie] with Mastodon/ActivityPub I had to create an Actor object and stuff and Solid seems to be taking a very similar approach there
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Zegnat Yes
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[eddie] Because I think solid is using ActivityStreams for some of the stuff from the look of it.
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[eddie] 🤷‍♂️
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[eddie] It'll be interesting to see.
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[jgmac1106] I tried to capture some history here: http://bookmarks.jgregorymcverry.com/ though need to ask [tantek] and [kevinmarks] where all the old w3c listservs are archived, has to be a trasure trove of history
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[tantek] [jgmac1106] history -> meta
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Zegnat [eddie]: if any of those posts explain why I should wrap my Person in a PersonalProfileDocument, let me know ;)
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[jgmac1106] ha ha, but a post explaining h-card vs a PersonalProfileDocument would be a wonderful post so someone technical like zegnat or [eddie] to write
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[eddie] Zegnat Sounds good, I'll definitely keep an eye out for that! 😆
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[jgmac1106] especially in terms of size but I think zegnat you demonstarted that petermolnar was curling hte incorrect url?
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[eddie] I would be interested to see the size different of Zegnat's h-card vs the same data as a Solid Person 😆
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[eddie] That would be a good test
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[jgmac1106] ooh that would be a great learning exercise
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[tantek] [jgmac1106] that's a great post, in particular for teaching empathy towards new creatives, new developers
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[tantek] https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/the-day-i-quit-coding/
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[tantek] That screenshot looks like it's from an Apple][ though!
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[jgmac1106] yeah I should fix that
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Zegnat I was just going to see if I could on-the-fly transform my h-card into turtle and then claim to have one of the biggest Solid WebIDs... But that means learning what stuff would look like in RDF
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[eddie] 😆 nice
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[jgmac1106] <link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link><link>stuff</link> I think is how you do it
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Zegnat I usually think of https://vanderven.se/martijn/ = h-card = me. But it looks like RDF says https://vanderven.se/martijn/ = PersonalProfileDocument which will contain https://vanderven.se/martijn/#someid = Person = me
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Loqi Martijn van der Ven
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Zegnat Extra level of nesting, but I haven’t yet found the reason why they would want that
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[eddie] I think that's from ActivityStream
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[tantek] what is extra level of nesting?
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "extra level of nesting" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "extra level of nesting is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[eddie] Mastodon does the same thing
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Zegnat Most Solid URLs I can find always link straight to the Person object (e.g. #i or #card behind the links). So why not have the Person as the top level object?
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[tantek] extra level of nesting is /architecture_astronomy
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Loqi ok
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[eddie] I think it's so that you can have multiple objects at the same url
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[eddie] which is understandable, but I think there should be a way to have a url just have a default
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Zegnat As I understand Turtle you can always have as many objects within one file as you want. It is just that they set documentURL = PersonalProfileDocument and documentURL#someid = Person
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[eddie] I tend to shy away from that, but some people find it useful
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[eddie] Yeah, seems like you're further along than me!
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[eddie] 😆
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[tantek] eddie, right, we solved the edge case with adding markup, instead of making everyone add an extra layer of abstraction
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[eddie] tantek Correct
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[eddie] That's the issue, defaults
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Zegnat Turtle, WebID, FOAF, I got all the specs open [eddie] ;)
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[eddie] how mf2 has simple h-cards and based on the structure it can make assumptions
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[tantek] this is a common antipattern in CS architectures, adding extra layers just to solve edge cases, extra layers which burden everyone, and thus hurt the common case
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[eddie] yep
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[eddie] tantek++
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Loqi tantek has 24 karma in this channel over the last year (79 in all channels)
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Zegnat wonders if Solid has any validators
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Zegnat The problem is I cannot find the edge case documented anywhere either, [tantek] :(
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[tantek] Zegnat, that lack of documentation for the extraneous layers in things like RDF was one of the motivations behind the culture of documentation we have at microformats and indieweb
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Zegnat But of course I may just be misunderstanding RDF documents. Always a posibility
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[tantek] if you can't show your work, you don't have a proof
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[tantek] it's likely lost in some mailing list somewhere
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[eddie] 🤦
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Zegnat Wondering if there is an RDF or Solid IRC channel somewhere. Will have to have a look when I get home.
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Zegnat Was just doing some leisure spec reading on the train :P
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[eddie] The one really nice thing is because Solid PODs do seem very similar to the IndieWeb's approach (of separating UI and data storage), if Solid takes off enough to have some decent UIs, we can totally build some bridges to be able to use their UIs for our stuff.
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[eddie] If they had some really nice readers, you just build a Microsub server / POD conversion layer and we have more readers available
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Zegnat https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/#the-webid-http-uri
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Zegnat Hmm. Alright. So the Person object *is* me, and because an HTTP URL is not a person but a web document, they decided 2 URLs would be required. One for the person, and one for the document.
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[eddie] Zegnat++
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Loqi Zegnat has 59 karma in this channel over the last year (166 in all channels)
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@smithtimmytim This is why @brightpxblog now supports webmentions. (twitter.com/_/status/1090666519124557824)
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Zegnat Still feels weird to me. But I guess that is because I am so used to the indieweb way of homepage=me
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[eddie] Yeah, seems strange. I wouldn't say wrong, just strange from our perspective
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[eddie] Definitely seems like there is some tech fat there, though that could be trimmed off
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[eddie] 😆
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[eddie] kevinmarks++
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Loqi kevinmarks has 10 karma in this channel over the last year (31 in all channels)
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[kevinmarks] Are you often mistaken for a web document, zegnat?
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[tantek] Zegnat, you have stumbled upon the infamous HTTP Range 14. I'm sory
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[eddie] Zegnat, they use gitter for conversation
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[tantek] what is gitter
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Loqi Gitter is a silo chat provider used by some open-source projects and often linked to from README files on GitHub https://indieweb.org/Gitter
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[eddie] Ohhhh sure enough, HTTP Range 14 IS what's going on with the WebID stuff
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[jgmac1106] poor Bob, Alice hated the look of his webpage but she liked the looks of him so she needs two links for Bob??...tell Alice Bib will design his page any way he wants
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[kevinmarks] What is http range 14?
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Loqi HTTPRange-14 is a honeypot for architecture astronauts https://indieweb.org/HTTP_Range_14
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[eddie] Zegnat: https://irc.gitter.im/ you can connect through IRC
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[eddie] lol oh my, jgmac1106
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[kevinmarks] RDF << HTTPRange-14
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Loqi ok, I added "[[HTTPRange-14]]" to the "See Also" section of /RDF https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=56006&oldid=51851
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[jgmac1106] may use this paragraph in lesson in how not to write for understanding: FOAF describes the world using simple ideas inspired by the Web. In FOAF descriptions, there are only various kinds of things and links, which we call properties. The types of the things we talk about in FOAF are called classes. FOAF is therefore defined as a dictionary of terms, each of which is either a class or a property. Other projects alongside FOAF provide other s
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[jgmac1106] and properties, many of which are linked with those defined in FOAF.
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[eddie] 👀
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[jgmac1106] "there are only various kinds of things"---is basically saying there is everything. I know this isn'
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[jgmac1106] 't #dev but love the ambiguity in that sentence
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[tantek] [jgmac1106] it's definitely good to keep in mind for how *not* write abstract definitions
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[davidmead] zegnat - i just went through (I think) the inrupt/solid sign up myself. It’s a little “all over the shop” as we Brits say.
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[davidmead] I still don’t know if I’ve actually logged in or signed up as there are buttons to do both after completing it
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[tantek] davidmead this is why Web Sign-in sticks with a single button
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[davidmead] tantek yeah. some of this feels like an already solved problem
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[tantek] davidmead, pretty much all of it is. It's generally NIH on top of beating the RDF horse.
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[tantek] this is what happens when you 1 ignore the broader set of work in an area, 2 don't bother to document your own work
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[davidmead] reminds me a little of early online banking - fancy homepage, but when you try to do something in your account it’s all early 90's HTML and mystery meat nav & labels placed by backend devs
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[davidmead] wondering if they’re looking for a UX person 😉
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[tantek] we can likely all use incrementally better UX 🙂
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Zegnat Hmm. So I could allow conneg on vanderven.se/martijn/ and if you want turtle I could offer a 303 redirect to vanderven.se/martijn/allthewaydown.ttl which will be a PersonalProfileDocument. That way Solid tools *should* accept https://vanderven.se/martijn/ as my WebID?
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Loqi Martijn van der Ven
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Zegnat Place your bets now on whether you think any RDF tools will understand that
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[schmarty] zegnat: it feels like you're on the verge of developing a fork bomb for profile resolution. 👍
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[eddie] lol Zegnat that sounds like it definitely SHOULD work. But I'm gonna but absolutely it will blow up on 60% of the tools you try it with
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[eddie] Really, Zegnat you just needs to research new web technologies so you can edge case them
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Zegnat That’s a job I would jump on. But it doesn’t feel like a lot of people will pay me for it :D
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[eddie] You never know
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[eddie] some migh
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[eddie] might*
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Zegnat I am going to let this idea simmer a bit and maybe return with a proof-of-concept tomorrow.
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Zegnat Lets see if I can bridge IndieWeb and Solid. I will probably need to write a microformats2 namespace. Hmm.
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Zegnat rhiaro (ping?) did you ever end up publishing an mf2 rdf schema?
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snarfed the Google+ API "brownout" is kind of fascinating. bridgy started seeing a small number of API calls 404 today.
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snarfed HttpError 404 when requesting https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/me/activities/public?alt=json&maxResults=50 returned "Google+ APIs will be shut down on March 7, 2019. This includes Google+ Sign-in. This will be a progressive shutdown, with intermittent failures starting as early as January 28, 2019. Learn more at http://developers.google.com/+/api-shutdown"
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[schmarty] yeah i don't think i have seen that before
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snarfed i've definitely seen it with internal services at a few places before
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snarfed but yeah still interesting
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[tantek] they should include lyrics from "Daisy" in those 404 or 500 pages
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@jgmac1106 @ThinkPrivacyIO Great post on social media alternatives. I am happy that webmentions and new social readers are going to allow me to create my social network from my own website. http://opensource.com should do a round up post on what is new in… https://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/2019/01/30/thinkprivacyio-great-post-on-social-media-alternatives (twitter.com/_/status/1090695399625629696)
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[jgmac1106] @zegnat check in with [benwerd] I know his goal for Known was to support both JSON-LD and mf2 but the JSON-LD may not have gone much past what is required Single Sign On for LTI
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Zegnat It’ll depend on what standards Known wanted to support. I am going to dive into this RDF stuff a little more first
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[davidmead] thought i had solved OYG not posting my photos into Known by disabling a couple of plugins (Bit.ly link shortener and Chrome). When I did that I got a photo to post from the OYG dashboard. Re-enabled the Bit.ly plugin and it failed, but disabling that again didn’t let me post anymore
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[davidmead] this seems a very strange bug
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@jgmac1106 ↩️ plus over 1.4 million webmentions sent being powered by microformats as well, and if you count all of the Mastodon users (since every instance includes mf2) the number of use cases seems to be at a high point and growing and not a low point. (https://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/s/1G0f5B) (twitter.com/_/status/1090700453283799040)
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[kevinmarks] I've seen that brown out thing before - maybe when twitter changed apis?
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snarfed ch
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[tantek] ch ch ch changes?
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[schmarty] WOAH! congrats [manton] on https://www.manton.org/2019/01/30/custom-templates-categories.html
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[schmarty] from jekyll to hugo!
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[manton] Thanks!
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[schmarty] having recently that for my own site, i imagine it was a good chunk of work!
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[manton] I also added categories support to the Micropub endpoint, which has been fun to work on.
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[manton] Yep, lots of work but I'm really excited about what is possible now.
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[schmarty] manton++ this is really good stuff
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Loqi manton has 24 karma in this channel over the last year (59 in all channels)
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aaronpk Whoa! You rewrote everything for Hugo?
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aaronpk is it like a million times faster now?
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[manton] [aaronpk] Yes, it's much faster. The things that are still slow are my fault and I can fix them. 🙂
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[tantek] manton++ great job
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Loqi manton has 25 karma in this channel over the last year (60 in all channels)
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aaronpk That's great! Must have been a lot of work
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aaronpk what is PWA?
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Loqi Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web site that a client can progressively enhance into a standalone app that's comparable with a native app https://indieweb.org/PWA
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aaronpk PWA << https://twitter.com/mhartington/status/1089292031548145666
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Loqi ok, I added "https://twitter.com/mhartington/status/1089292031548145666" to the "See Also" section of /Progressive_Web_App https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=56022&oldid=46886
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aaronpk \o/
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[schmarty] Um that is pretty exciting
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aaronpk the Teacup PWA i wrote in nurnberg has been super useful already
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[schmarty] aaronpk: did you check out any of the meta-micropub client talk earlier?
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[tantek] Does this mean offline reading is coming to Monocle?
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aaronpk loollll
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aaronpk that's gonna be so much work but it would be cool
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[tantek] one can dream
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[tantek] I have heard from many folks (ahem benwerd ahem) that that's the key use-case for them, same reason they listen to podcasts on commutes / subway etc.
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[tantek] pretty sure you could get benwerd to switch readers if you added offline reading support
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aaronpk i feel like most of the time i open my reader is when i also want to interact with the posts
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aaronpk so i would need to also buffer the favs/replies created while offline and push them up later
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[tantek] sure, you should be able to like/respond to posts while offline as well 🙂
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[tantek] yessssss
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aaronpk (not to mention the read status too)
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[tantek] gmail sorta supports this now
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snarfed offline first PWAs! reminds me of the design in https://snarfed.org/posting-to-the-indieweb-from-your-phone (from before most of our reader work)
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aaronpk it would be *so cool* though
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[tantek] I've noticed while my wifi is flakey that I can still reply and archive emails
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[schmarty] I have been hitting this a bunch since I started riding the subway more
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aaronpk yeah gmail is really good about it
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aaronpk haha yeah NYC does that to you
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snarfed https://indieweb.org/offline