Yes, I’m aware of that, but I chose not to mention it because it wasn’t the focus of the article (it’s not only to Solid developers either). I almost added a footnote to clarify, but in the end I decided not to do it because it was too tangential to the main point and I thought it’d just be confusing.
Now, as to what I think about it. I can’t say a lot because I haven’t used any of the new approach in practice. But I can say that the type index has been easy to implement and understand for the most part, and I worry that the new approach isn’t. In practice, most people is not even using the type index, so I worry that this becoming more complex will mean even less interoperability in practice :(.
Something that worries me in particular is that this new approach seems to require apps having a canonical url, which is a problem for apps that don’t have one (such as mobile apps, desktop apps, or apps served from a .zip or distributed filesystem).
But all of this is just my gut reaction, as I said I haven’t used it (or even read a lot about it), so I can’t say for sure. Maybe I change my mind when I use it. I also understand that we need more granularity, but if it comes at the cost of added complexity and means that nobody will use it in practice (like the type index is already not being used), I’m not sure if it’s a decent trade-off. Maybe it would be nice if the type index, which is simple enough, is added to the specs together with more complex features.
I guess all this “complexity” wouldn’t be a problem if there were good tutorials and clear best practices, but at the moment I feel like making a Solid App is a bit of the wild west. A lot of apps are still using an authentication client that has been deprecated for a year (even new apps, not just unmaintained apps), and I think if we look at the landscape today what we have the most is what I call “obfuscated interoperability”.
I don’t want to sound negative, I know this ecosystem is still growing and eventually we should converge into best practices. But that’s how I feel about how things are at the moment.