Updates on spec-related activities in the forum

Last week I created an issue in the Solid Process repository aimed at looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of Solid Panels. While we got some good feedback on how to improve the panels, we also fielded some legitimate feedback that there’s not enough participation on this forum from those of us who are working directly on various parts of the specification.

It’s true that we probably aren’t active enough in here. We’re spending most of our time working out of Github because that’s where the vast majority of authoring and editing is happening (and that work is time-consuming). That said, there are some good discussions happening in here that we could and should add to. Similarly, there are some good discussions happening in other places (like panels) that many of you could and should be contributing to as well.

For starters, I think that we could start providing some updates in here related to spec-related activities. We’re already capturing minutes on the W3CG wiki, but this forum is probably a better place than a wiki to have follow-on threaded discussions about some of the work in flight. I’m not exactly sure what the right amount of cross-posting is.If anyone has ideas, lets hear them :slight_smile:

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Nice to hear, @justin! It might be an idea to look into the Discourse git plugins on meta.discourse.org for integrations to the forum (and vice versa). These could be real timesavers in keeping everyone informed and in sync.

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Hello!

This is good to know. I said quite a few stupid things here before I became aware that the auth panel was working on an update of the auth spec (https://github.com/solid/authentication-panel/blob/master/oidc-authentication.md), for instance :sweat_smile:

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@divoplade How did you end up hearing about the authentication panel? Have you been able to join any live sessions? Are you following the minutes? You should’ve been able to know about that work happening from the start, and I think that points to some issues we’ve got with making information available and easy to find.

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Well, I started to search for webid authentication, and both Google and Wikipedia redirect to this document: https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc-spec

Side note: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebID) puts a lot of emphasis on the legacy webid-tls, which I think is not great to convince the non-solid web world that we are using the same tools as them, with oauth, oidc, tokens, …

I would see some quick fixes:

I guess it’s the same thing for all the other specs / panels. For instance, the WAC spec (http://solid.github.io/web-access-control-spec) could link to the https://github.com/solid/authorization-and-access-control-panel . There are frequent discussions about “how do I request a permission with my app?” that are asked here but in the scope of the authz panel, and I have the feeling that the WAC spec is read more than the authz panel draft https://github.com/solid/authorization-and-access-control-panel/blob/master/privilege-request-protocol.md

The first time I heard about the panel was on Security Advisory: May 15, 2020

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@divoplade Great insight - thank you. Did you spend any time on solidproject.org? One of the things we need to look at is whether that site is helping people quickly get an understanding of solid and navigate them quickly based on what they’re looking for. So far the feedback has been mixed on that front.

I think I visited an older version of this, in which the app development tutorial started by using yeoman (I did not like how it asked me to send data from my development machine).

Anyways, I am not really the ideal target developer: I had some experience with programming, but no experience in web development (I have since read the Mozilla JS guide, which was very helpful I think, but I’ve yet to understand all the frontend work with react, angular, typescript and such). And I already knew a few bits about linked data.

@justin you have probably seen it, but it is a long thread. I wrote about what I expect on solid project website here Solid scope and ecosystem and a bit later on in detail on how terminology is confusing. I think wrt the website reading onwards from that post gives some good feedback.

Yup I have - it’s great feedback :slightly_smiling_face: Hoping to get feedback from as many people as possible to surface frequently recurring patterns.

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