Greetings. Thanks, Kingsley, for the trace of the various steps.
On 2013 Aug 7, at 19:14, Norman Gray <nor...@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote: > Hey -- this stuff is easy! (and nearly works) Walking home, it occurred to me that this is easy in a very _specific_ sense: (given that someone had added some UI chrome around Nicholas Humfrey's script) I would not think it unreasonable to walk a non-technical friend through that process, giving them the script but not touching their mouse or keyboard, and ending up with a usable WebID. Now, that particular process requires that we first sign said n-t-f up at purl.org, on the entirely reasonable assumption that they don't have an account there already. That violates Hugh's demand that he avoid 'one last login'. However it nonetheless does distil out the point that this last step, of associating a 303-redirect with a URI you control, is the _only_ irreducibly exotic web step in the process. Also, purl.org shows that that can be done straightforwardly (or reasonably so, since purl.org's interface could use some prettification). Hmm: things like bit.ly are URI rewriting services, albeit 302-only. People manage to use bit.ly aaaall the time. Therefore _if_ Hugh discovered that any of the accounts he already owns allows him to add this one bit of plumbing, and presuming he has something like Dropbox, to turn the action of putting bytes on the web into a non-exotic step, then he's sorted. By the way: 'non-exotic' here, means an action that the n-t-f already has some mental model of, and which they have already managed to do, for some other entirely pragmatic reason. Interestingly, I suspect that the process of generating the WebID certificate in the browser fails this test, _even though_ the certificate has to end up in the browser (other than on OS X), because there's no clear mental model of what's happening in this step, and that matters. ---- The above does sidestep the question of why the n-t-f so wants a WebID. None of the examples that have appeared in this thread so far are compelling in the right way, I think, but it would only take one gmail or dropbox or similar to decide to try WebID, for the whole thing to suddenly work. All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
