Hugh, hello. On 2013 Aug 6, at 21:17, Hugh Glaser <[email protected]> wrote:
> It still seems to me that this is not a technology that is very useable - it > really shouldn't have taken so many messages to help me! > I was thinking of setting up for my users to use WebID on a little social > networking site I have, but I think I will give it a miss for the moment! I think I disagree -- I now think that WebID _is_ extremely usable... _once it's working the first time_.[1] As of this afternoon, I'm a Fan. I've been repeatedly surprised, today, in finding out just how easy it's been to log in to a couple of different services: I go to a web site, my browser (Chrome and Safari on OS X) spontaneously asks me which certificate I want to use, I select one, and ... that's it.[2] Yes, it's a bit of a pain to set up because (like most things involving the semantic web stack *sigh*) it requires one to know a little bit about more, and more disparate, things than do most technologies. But that's OK: the membership of this list probably constitutes a large fraction (10%?) of the world population of folk who might plausibly be interested in setting up a WebID identity/presence/wotsit by hand. Any usability problem for this group doesn't matter, to first order. A social networking site such as you mention is surely exactly the place which should be offering this sort of facility for its users, and if that involves a bit of head-scratching for its creator, that's a price the world will pay! This seems to be the model gestured towards by the WebID document at <http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID#Do_I_already_have_a_WebID.3F> [1] It's not clear to me how a use of a social networking site, which supports WebIDs for its users, gets the certificate into their browser. Is it just "click on this link and if it says 'can I install?' say yes!"? [2] How does the service tell my client to do the WebID dance? I can imagine it's in <http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/> somewhere, but is there a one-line answer? (that document talks about Alice and Bob, and they always make my heart sink) I'm still a bit un-thrilled by the range of services I can get to (though thanks for the links, Kingsley and Melvin), but I suspect that's just a matter of getting over an uptake hump. Also, and most amazingly, this is the first _ever_ X.509 application I've come across that isn't a massive UI train-wreck. Hitherto, OS X Mail and Keychain had been the out-of-sight winners, having ascended to the giddy heights of merely 'poor' (I recently had to renew a grid certificate, and that CA has improved massively in the last couple of years -- very well done to them, on limited resources -- so that it is now 'bad, but rising 'poor' if you know what you're doing'). All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
