#dev 2020-12-15

2020-12-15 UTC
#
GWG
I'm thinking of moving the web-signin part of the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress to its own separate plugin.
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GWG
I'm asking in here because we haven't talked Web Sign In in a while as a thing
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GWG
Anyone been thinking about it lately?
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aaronpk
is that the part that lets you sign in to your wordpress site using an external indieauth server?
gxt and KartikPrabhu joined the channel
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GWG
aaronpk: Effectively yes
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GWG
It won't work without fixes
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GWG
I was thinking of switching it to relmeauth
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aaronpk
i definitely support pulling it out into its own plugin since it does a very different thing than turning your wordpress site into an indieauth server
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GWG
aaronpk: I just wonder how a rel me link could hint that it supports identity verification, such as oauth or IndieAuth.
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aaronpk
it doesn't really need to
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aaronpk
because the site will have to have oauth credentials in order to be able to use a rel-me link already, so it will only look for ones it knows about
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aaronpk
indieauth isn't done with rel=me, it's done with rel=authorization_endpoint
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GWG
aaronpk: But web signin isn't
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GWG
When someone puts a URL into a web sign in form, I need to figure out what the WordPress site will do
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aaronpk
it would look for rel=me or rel=authorization_endpoint
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GWG
In the past, it would use the user URL to confirm a relationship between the url entered and a user on the current site
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GWG
But those are user settable
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GWG
I have to figure out how to map users on one site to the other. So that sounds like rel me
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aaronpk
i would avoid parsing html unless you really need to
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GWG
Then what is the alternative
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aaronpk
"unless you really need to" being the operative part of that sentence
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GWG
The issue is how I changed things to address the revisions to IndieAuth
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GWG
I removed the code that matches URLs as redundant and insecure
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GWG
So I now completely ignore the passed me value.
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GWG
Which means the web sign in side of things won't quite work the same
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GWG
Unless I either modify it or come up with another way.
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GWG
The use case being logging into a multiuser site using a single user site
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GWG
So, I need a way to say that user pfefferle on notiz.blog is the same as the user who controls pfefferle.org
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GWG
That sounds like I have to do relmeauth
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GWG
Or something similar
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GWG
Speaking broadly, what is the trust relationship here?
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GWG
What does pfefferle.org need to know and what does notiz.blog need to know to ensure that someone doesn't get into something they shouldn't?
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aaronpk
you said notiz.blog has a user record with the URL pfefferle.org
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aaronpk
so notiz.blog does the indieauth flow starting with the user-entered pfefferle.org, and the result will be https://pfefferle.org/, so it works out fine
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aaronpk
nothing about the relationship between the two sites changed with the spec updates
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Loqi
Hallo, mein Name ist Matthias Pfefferle, ich blogge, podcaste und schreibe eine Kolumne über das open, independent und federated social Web. Aktuell arbeite ich als Head of Product Development WordPress für IONOS in Karlsruhe. Seit der zweite...
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GWG
aaronpk: It didn't change with the spec, it changed when I stopped looking for the user record because me was declared optional and became unnecessary. I need to rethink it for this use case then
[chrisaldrich], [tw2113_Slack_], [KevinMarks], geoffo and [jgmac1106] joined the channel
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aaronpk
i am nearly done making an educational tool for OAuth and now I'm thinking this could be useful for helping people with indieauth stuff too
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aaronpk
it's not quite a test suite, it's a bit more guided of an experience than that
gRegorLove, geoffo, ShadowKyogre, gbmor, strugee, lahacker and hirusi joined the channel; ShadowKyogre left the channel
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hirusi
Is there something that takes in raw data, converts it to a suitable Micropub friendly data and then can forward it to a Micropub server to publish?
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hirusi
Preferably in Node?
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hirusi
Tall ask, but wanted to try my luck. :D
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[KevinMarks]
What kind of raw data?
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hirusi
Good q. So I already have a Micropub client I'm building where I'm receiving form data from a user, I'd like for a module to take the "mapping" (my variables -> its internal micropub-specific variables) from me, and generate MP friendly data... so if I have a title field called 'name', I'd say name is the title, and it'd make sure everything is taken care of. Similar for all other fields invovled in post creation...categories, syndi
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hirusi
cate to, etc.
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hirusi
does that make sense, I wonder...
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Loqi
Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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Loqi
[jamietanna] #4 Providing hints to the user of errors on their part
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jamietanna[m]
Hirusi that's similar to how I've done it - I've got properties exposed in my https://www-api.jvt.me/micropub?q=config that map directly to what's in my server. Then I process them in terms of the Kind that is discovered
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hirusi
jamietanna is your implementation re-usable if I wanted to "drop it in" into my project?
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jamietanna[m]
Sorry no it won't be as I'm a Java project, whereas I see you asked for Node
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jamietanna[m]
I'll be unhelpful and say it'd be awesome if, in the case you do it yourself, you package it up for others to use! 🤞🏽 You can reuse bits from other clients - I'm sure there's a micropub package on npm
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hirusi
Yeah, if not, I want to ideally make mine reusable... but let's see how this plays out. I'm currently working on making my indieauth implementation reusable. 😅
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hirusi
So Micropub would be next, I think.
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beko
thx jamietanna[m]
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Loqi
beko: jamietanna[m] left you a message 1 hour, 38 minutes ago: https://github.com/indieweb/Micropub/issues/4 may be of interest ☺
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beko
thx Loqi
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Loqi
you're welcome, beko
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petermolnar
question: should I use SVG or imagemap + a tiny amount of JS if I want an imagemap that can be dynamically sized to viewport?
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beko
!tell jamietanna[m] Error reporting is hard. Not showing this to a user makes sense when the message is provided from the remote server for various reasons like not translatable (as the client can not know before) and it may hold variable data and/or placeholders. There should however always be an _easy_ way to obtain it for purposes like bug reporting (read: without switching to a dev mode). There are
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Loqi
Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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beko
various ways to solve this issue and personally I like the approach of providing an error code(!) that can be looked up from a list. The Micropub is very why on this. jamietanna[m] see https://jsonapi.org/examples/#error-objects-error-codes for an example how this could look. I also like how this avoids any camel/snake casing (so PHP and Java devs can bear it too xD)
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beko
eep, that became a ted talk xD
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[KevinMarks]
Svg is naturally scalable and you can associate links with arbitrary shapes more easily - it depends on what you're doing exactly, but I think it is likely clearer.
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beko
huh? It can?
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jamietanna
but as this is all user-provided data it can be much more problematic, and doing client-side validation isn't the best
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jamietanna
So I guess on my side, I've got some detailed error messages detailing what's wrong with a differnet field. The only solution for that is for me to get it standardised what all those field errors are, or have the Micropub client fetch some error details from some location (i.e. in my Micropub server via a q=) which then draws us back to why not use the `error_description` which is already there. In OAuth2 there's a bit less that can go wrong,
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petermolnar
I was leaning towards svg as well; imagemaps, while wonderfully oldschool, are not a good fit in the random screen size era.
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beko
I… need more coffee. That should have been "The Micropub spec is very shy on this".
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@mekarpeles
↩️ That we can't use something like the Web Mentions spec to allow websites or services to know which other sites or "registered" individuals are mentioning them elsewhere on the web. https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
(twitter.com/_/status/1338793085526917120)
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petermolnar
it seems like nobody did an imagemap to svg converter yet
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petermolnar
back to hand writing html then
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beko
I've a hard time to remember the last time I have used an imagemap myself. The last time I've seen an imagemap was on aaronpk first(?) website though. That was a fun flashback :D
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[Raphael_Luckom]
svg is fantastic
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petermolnar
it would be if I was able to get svg "imagemaps" working
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petermolnar
so far, no luck
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aaronpk
can't svgs contain hyperlinks?
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petermolnar
yes, they can, I even went through multiple tutorials on "svg image maps", yet I'm failing to produce one that works as expected
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[Raphael_Luckom]
```<svg viewBox="0 0 240 80" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
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[Raphael_Luckom]
.small { font: italic 13px sans-serif; }
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<style>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
.heavy { font: bold 30px sans-serif; }
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[Raphael_Luckom]
* fill property, the color property is for HTML only */
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[Raphael_Luckom]
/* Note that the color of the text is set with the *
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[Raphael_Luckom]
.Rrrrr { font: italic 40px serif; fill: red; }
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[Raphael_Luckom]
</style>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/"><text x="20" y="35" class="small">My</text></a>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<text x="40" y="35" class="heavy">cat</text>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<text x="55" y="55" class="small">is</text>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<text x="65" y="55" class="Rrrrr">Grumpy!</text>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/"><circle cx="120" cy="30" r="10"/></a>
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[Raphael_Luckom]
</svg>```
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[KevinMarks]
It doesn't work if you embed them as img AFAIK
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[KevinMarks]
You need to inline the svg
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petermolnar
that's a rather big difference
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aaronpk
oh yeah dom something something
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KartikPrabhu
yeah the SVG DOM is not accessible from the main one. When the SVG is inline, it is simply part of the main DOM
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[Raphael_Luckom]
i never knew that...whenever I've tried to do tricky things with svg, I've always been doing JS stuff so it was more natural to just stick it in the dom than into an img element. interesting!
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KartikPrabhu
it is same reason. you won't be able to access the img SVG DOM with JS either
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[Raphael_Luckom]
I haven't found that to be the case--you can indeed manipulate embedded svg with JS: http://rluckom.github.io/jsGameOfLife/
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aaronpk
right, embedded, not img
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[Raphael_Luckom]
which is what I was describing before I got well actuallyd
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KartikPrabhu
no that is what I meant. If you want JS access, you have to embed the SVG, you cannot put it in an img tag
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[KevinMarks]
You can iframe it, but then you need to be careful about link target.
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petermolnar
ok... I'm lost. What is wrong with the svg in this? http://petermolnar.net/note/my-image-wall/index.html
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petermolnar
why are the xlink rects not clickable?
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Loqi
[Peter Molnar] My photo wall
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petermolnar
(that note is not done)
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KartikPrabhu
no, it is the fill:none on the rect
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KartikPrabhu
so basically the rectangles have zero area to click on
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KartikPrabhu
xlink needs to be used for cross-browser stuff
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KartikPrabhu
so it seems to be a combination of things
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KartikPrabhu
your <image> is the last element so it goes on top of all others in the SVG. that blocks the clicks from going through to the <a>
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KartikPrabhu
so put the <image> on top
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KartikPrabhu
then secondly, the rectangles are empty because of the fill:none so there is no clickable area
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petermolnar
I was moving the image around to see if it makes a diff
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petermolnar
originally it was the first element
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KartikPrabhu
I think you need to fix both issues
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petermolnar
thank you
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KartikPrabhu
maybe look for a way to do transparent fill
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petermolnar
<defs><style>rect {fill: transparent;}</style></defs> works
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KartikPrabhu
ok, yeah it works as CSS but somehow transparent did not work for me as a direct SVG attribute
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petermolnar
fascinating; pandoc really doesn't want to render this properly from markdown
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[KevinMarks]
give a fill colour with 0 alpha?
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KartikPrabhu
yeah that should also work
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KartikPrabhu
rgba(0,0,0,0)
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schmudde
aaronpk: Hello - this is what I'm working on https://yorba.co/
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schmudde
Thie site is pretty vague, currently.
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aaronpk
i like the design tho :)
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aaronpk
this is basically what i imagine the landing page for the service to replace indieauth.com should look like :D
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schmudde
Thanks. That's kind of why I got involved. They are a UX/design/product-first team. Not an engineering team.
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aaronpk
in fact if you wanted to make it an indieauth provider i'd happily just point people there to get them off indieauth.com
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jacky
oh yorba's an actual company?
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jacky
this is dope
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schmudde
Yeah - Yorba is a public benefit corporation in the USA
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jacky
agh this is what i wanted fortress to be tbh
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jacky
time and energy are the blockers lol
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aaronpk
haha jacky i was thinking that too
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schmudde
Well - they want to work on the identity problem. And you all know the problem very well. I am definitely pushing them to support IndieAuth early.
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schmudde
It's easy to implement and the community is super smart. You'll tell us if our product sucks.
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aaronpk
is there something running yet?
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schmudde
Not yet. Just bootstrapping now.
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[KevinMarks]
getting the to do the rel-me thing is good too if you're linking identities
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[KevinMarks]
is this going to have profiles
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schmudde
Indeed. I don't want Yorba to invent the wheel. I'm pushing them to integrate existing and emerging technologies and win on UX.
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schmudde
They want to have profiles... but it's currently now a very strong concept.
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schmudde
The current idea is starting with identity management across platforms. So knowing what services you're paying for and what newsletters you're subscribed to.
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schmudde
Not easy problems, but problems that other companies have tackled.
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aaronpk
the trick will be getting websites to accept these identities
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[KevinMarks]
well the profiles with ux thing is linktree or about.me
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aaronpk
but that's where indieauth helps, because the websites don't have to treat this as a special provider
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schmudde
Totally.
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schmudde
We cant' get that traction at the beginning. So we'll have to win on services.
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schmudde
I have to jump on a call - but will check back in here later. If anybody wants to chat a bit more, I'm also at schmudde@yorba.co. I might have met a few of you virtually at this year's Internet Identity Conference.
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[tantek]
what is Yorba
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Loqi
It looks like we don't have a page for "Yorba" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "Yorba is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[tantek]
^ can you define it in terms of its interest in adopting IndieAuth?
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[tantek]
or could use a competitor that supports rel=me
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[KevinMarks]
sure, I use my own site, but it's nice when the silos support it too.
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[tantek]
I feel like it may be time to restart the social network portability formats efforts that we had going on back in the mid 2000s in the #microformats community.
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[tantek]
We have a lot better understanding of the broader extent of the actual content that people put on social networks than back then (per all the IndieWeb pages about /silos that document their features)
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[tantek]
And we have a lot more discussion / nuanced understanding of privacy / "shared" content concerns (e.g. who "owns" the comments & likes on your posts?)
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[tantek]
Also we're so far beyond what RSS can/does represent (see /posts) that it's much easier to dismiss the out of hand the armchair "just use RSS" suggestions as being from folks who really haven't bothered to pay attention for the past 15 years.
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jacky
[tantek]: that's very true
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jacky
that kinda sounds like the whole data portability thing FB/Goog wanted to do sans the actual portability bit
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jacky
yup iirc
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jacky
tbh that's more something the people deep in dweb should be looking to integrate with
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jacky
but <handwaves>
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[tantek]
snarfed, jacky, I was involved with datatransferproject for a while but tbh it kinda lost momentum, and was fairly hamstrung by BigCo politics, weird bidirectional peering requirements
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[tantek]
it's a good source for ideas and works in progress, but it's a non-starter for actual simple(r) open formats. note that the dev docs start with npm install a bunch of crap
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[tantek]
jacky, I have had trouble finding "people deep in dweb" that are actually interesting (as in put time & effort into) real interop for users. There's a lot of ignore (or burn down) the status quo and just come build new sandcastles in our new protocol/blockchain etc.
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[tantek]
s/interesting/interested in
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[tantek]
part of this I think comes from a lack of actually eating their own cooking
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lahacker
aaanything to put an end to "just use RSS"
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lahacker
i can't believe how often it's still used
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[tantek]
lahacker, the best technique for that that I've found is to ignore the "just use RSS" armchair architects that only tweet and don't even bother to actually post on their own sites (or rarely do)
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[tantek]
(some of) the ones that *do* post / use their own sites, especially if they POSSE, they're worth having a good socratic dialog with to find common ground to move forward
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jacky
I still look at the ssb folks as an example of those who not only eat but share their cooking w.r.t that regard (like they've even got Git working over SSB and use it for development with a mirror to GitHub)
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petermolnar
fyi: pandoc inserted a random <p> in the middle of the svg when "-markdown_in_html_blocks" option is added for conversion from markdown to html5. I don't know, why, but that was the reason why I couldn't render it - should anyone ever wonder about unexpected <p> tags in their pandoc converted documents.
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[KevinMarks]
Ah right, that would be a problem for svg as it wants it to be strict xml, so would want a <p></p> (unlike real html). There's probably a way to tell pandoc to do that for the svg blocks, but getting it to not imply <p> would be good (is 2 newlines a <p> in CommonMark?)
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[tantek]
jacky, yeah ssb folks are quite hopeful, agreed with you there.
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[tantek]
snarfed, this is what I'm talking about, this feels quite impenetrable: https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/blob/master/Documentation/Developer.md
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[snarfed]
eh. it’s a couple nontrivial toolchains in parallel…but if their audience is modern developers, it’s not crazy.
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[snarfed]
is it right or good or ideal, separate q, but it’s not unusual
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[snarfed]
if their audience isn’t modern web-oriented developers, then yes, it’s unreasonable
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[tantek]
pretty sure aaronpk expressed similar frustration at the "just npm install..." attitude on a different project/subject, and he's very much an expert modern web developer
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[tantek]
from a standards/interop perspective, I do think it's quite unreasonable to start with that kind of a barrier (npm install)
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[snarfed]
if you want to argue “is it good or right or ideal?” then sure. my point is that it’s not a surprising or unreasonable burden for many modern developers
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lahacker
tantek, i just want to say "just use IndieWeb" but that's not a good equivalent.. realizing now that maybe the correct response is "just use h-feed", not something i've considered before
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lahacker
and re: git.. i learned the other day you can use your website/domain as your "email" in .gitconfig
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lahacker
so now i kind of want to put a link in my commit messages back to its h-entry as /some/ kind of POSSE
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[tantek]
lahacker, right, not only is "[just] use IndieWeb" also insufficient, but similarly "h-feed" doesn't cover all the important bits either.
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lahacker
exactly
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[tantek]
I think the closest thing we have is the blog export/import portability format thing that [manton] worked on (implemented?) that I don't remember the name of
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lahacker
i've been looking into it lately
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lahacker
blog archive format seems to have been deprecated as of recent in favor of a JSON feed + MF HTML zip/GitHub sync
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Loqi
[Manton Reece] Bringing back GitHub archiving
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lahacker
i'm going to be doing similar and i'll try to run with whatever of his that i can
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lahacker
it was the first thiing i thought of when you said "social network portability"
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jacky
lahacker: that would be sick w.r.t links and github, I didn't know that
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petermolnar
[KevinMarks]: I'm still looking why Pandoc did what it did; if I find the reasons, I'll share them.
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@matrixdotorg
Incredible news from the EU: mandating open interoperability for communication silos, or face a 10%(!!!) fine of worldwide turnover. @facebook, @slack, @microsoftteams, @whatsapp, @twitter - you know where to find us... :) 🙋🏼‍♀️ https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1338870807561461762
(twitter.com/_/status/1338924188782956548)
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petermolnar
yeah, right. Is it going to be enforced in Ireland, just like GDPR?
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petermolnar
that whole thing is an anti-piracy package in disguise
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mayakate[m]
[I have precisely one hope for this kind of thing](https://maya.land/responses/2020/07/29/effs-legislative-proposals-for-internet-interoperability.html) that probably won't see any kind of daylight
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[KevinMarks]
The less good pay is this is the encryption stuff
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[tantek]
17th XFN anniversary today. That may be worth posting about
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[tantek]
any new rel=me publishers or consuming services in the past year or two?
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Loqi
[hawx] relme-auth: An implementation of http://microformats.org/wiki/RelMeAuth
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[KevinMarks]
Good occasion to remind linktree et al of their roots
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GWG
I thought about being one yesterday
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GWG
I need a good project. The two at the top of my list are stalled.
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@luka_harambasic
Awesome article by @m_ott on @css. Somehow I spend the last hours reading about webrings, webmentions, blogrolls, and thought about the time I started web development... And having just relaunched my website, I couldn't agree more. https://css-tricks.com/make-it-personal/
(twitter.com/_/status/1338995797346684930)
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