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   Kari'boka (kariboka@social.harpia.red)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 13:39:44 JST Kari'boka

   • Hrefna (DHC)
   @hrefna is there a reason why AP was built this way?
   • Embed this notice
     Martin Atkins (apparentlymart@mastodon.online)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 12:21:38 JST Martin Atkins

     in reply to

     @kariboka
     All of that said, I have a lot of respect both for those who worked through the messy specification process and those who made working software from it despite the gaps.

     I burned out from all the conflicting requirements we were trying to meet in the early work, and I'm glad that others had more stamina to make the compromises needed to get something published. Now we get to learn from it and improve. 😀

     Kari'boka likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Kari'boka (kariboka@social.harpia.red)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 12:21:38 JST Kari'boka

     in reply to

     • Martin Atkins
     @apparentlymart wow thanks! That makes a lot of sense.
     
     You think we could improve AP? Or better make something from scratch?
   • Embed this notice
     Martin Atkins (apparentlymart@mastodon.online)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 12:21:39 JST Martin Atkins

     in reply to

     @kariboka
     Unfortunately when it's used as the primary API rather than as a sidecar thing to drive a feed reader -- particularly when trying to encode important functional information like exactly who an item is intended to be sent to -- this "just display the thing as best you can and let the human make sense of it" idea doesn't really work anymore.

     That is, assuming it ever did. I gave feed readers a lot of grace for making best effort back in the day, but the results were often suboptimal!

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     Martin Atkins (apparentlymart@mastodon.online)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 12:21:40 JST Martin Atkins

     in reply to

     @kariboka
     I cannot comment on ActivityPub in particular because I wasn't involved in that, but the Activity Streams model it builds on started its life as some optional extra metadata for Atom and RSS feeds, designed with the assumption that it was "best effort" and software consuming it could just fall back on plain Atom/RSS if they find something they can't understand.

     That turned into a JSON thing and then into a JSON-LD thing, but still has the essence of "do your best, ignore weird stuff".

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