Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

probably won’t finish my new static site generator makefile by the end of today but hopefully will by the end of new years

@gaditb (DID registry is here if you are curious <https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/#did-methods>. i think this whole thing is very silly and reinventing problems we all agreed were a bad idea like ten years ago)

@gaditb the at protocol then specifies how to turn that response plus the path into something meaningful

@gaditb see for yourself: https://plc.directory/did:plc:x4qyokjtdzgl7gmqhsw4ajqj

it's a centralized resolver service (plc.directory) that tracks a bunch of metadata about the thing in question

@gaditb what they're semantically saying is "ask the account plc:… for this post they made on bsky.app"; it's to support account portability (if they ever get a PLC resolver which allows that??)

@gaditb DIDs have a separate registry for all of the DID types that they maintain themselves, so you have to check the registry and look up wtf PLC is and how to resolve it

literally they just reinvented URNs but with a registry they own themselves. you can't resolve them without knowing what they mean

@gaditb i mean maybe i'm coming out as against websockets here, but idk, honestly i don't have to deal with these problems often enough to have a strong opinion

i think the easy case is easy and reachable with just XML, and maybe there's a more efficient, complex case which can be built on top of it, but the easy case should still be possible regardless

@gaditb this is very fucked up, just imo, but that's what it is

@gaditb did: is an IRI format which specifies a resolver (plc?) and a resource key; at:// is a protocol which takes a DID and indicates that it should be accessed using the AT protocol and then that the path should be followed (side-note: IETF does not like the name at: but has no mechanism by which to disallow it)

so this is saying

Access [PLC DID] with AT and then access the [app.bsky.feed.post] collection and then access item [ID] within it

@gaditb i think web/Unix/“view source” philosophy is that the result of any request should be a document, yeah

@gaditb i think i'm mostly in agreement but my sticking point is that if you want document structure to survive data transformation then you need to pick a document structure and stick with it conceptually, even if the view only exposes a subset

i think that the document structure you should pick should be conceptualized as XML Infoset as early in the process as possible, so that all your transformations are conceptually XML Infoset to XML Infoset, even if you're using a syntax which only actually exposes a part of that

i care less whether you're actually serializing that as XML, although I think Unix philosophy would state that at application boundaries you should be

@gaditb like i actually care a lot more about XML Infoset as a baseline than XML the set of strings which match the document production specified in the eXtensible Markup Language specification (version 1.0 or 1.1)

@gaditb ah yeah, i mean i’m very in favour of e.g. having an underlying dataset you can represent as RDF/XML or RDF Turtle or JSON-LD, and likewise the ability to represent a document in a lightweight syntax that converts to and from XML trivially…

…although practically, i think the source serialization DOES matter. it’s really really hard to write a transform for Any RDF/XML Document but it’s really easy to write one for an RDF/XML document which follows An Exact Structure. that’s why XMP and ActivityStreams both specify limitations on the actual transmission format that implementations need to follow, even though hypothetically there are a number of different ways of conveying the same thing

i think that it’s not really possible to avoid the meta-data of document structure as being a PART of how you work with and process that data. i like XML here mainly because “document structure” in XML is exceedingly well-defined. even IF you’re actually going back and forth with something else when you edit

@gaditb the significance of XML to me is the fact that it is fairly trivially convertible to HTML (or styleable with CSS directly) [or turn it into SILE if that's your fancy]

this is a practical concern not a technological one; the most portable formats for display are XML, and if that’s your destination format, it seems helpful to maintain that as far up the chain as you can

otherwise, surely they’ve developed something in the Lisp universe for this, right? isn’t that kind of the whole point?

happy holidays!

is www.gnu.org down for anybody else or is it just me

programming languages that do one thing well are great

like Makefile and executing shell commands to update files

or XSLT and transforming XML trees

or Ruby and making it impossible to know where any one method is defined

love them for that