Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Friday 10:00 - 11:00AM PT 2013-02-01

[Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org>]

Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:

Date:  Friday, 01 February 2013 USA
Time:  10:00AM - 11:00AM Pacific Time

ATTENDING

Bill Barnhill
Joseph Boyle
Les Chasen
Markus Sabadello
Drummond Reed

GUESTS

Animesh Chowdhury


***** NEWS & UPDATES *****

--- REPORT ON FIRST PERSONAL CLOUD MEETUP IN SAN FRANCISCO TUESDAY JAN 29

Drummond and Joseph gave a short summary of discussions about XDI at the meeting. Drummond’s slides on Respect Network explained that it plans to use XDI for all communications between the peer clouds (both personal and business) on the network.

  http://personalcloud1.eventbrite.com/
  http://www.virtrue.us/blog/is-a-personal-cloud-in-your-future/


--- TRANSITIONING CO-CHAIR ROLE

Bill explained that his desire to step down from the co-chair role is primarily a matter of freeing up more time to do XDI-related work. He would like to focus more time on an asynchronous version of the XDI protocol. In addition, his current job makes it difficult for him to regularly attend calls. He also wants to have more time to work on his own code development.

Bill nominated Markus to be co-chair. Les seconded that nomination.

Markus accepted the nomination and said he would very much like to be a co-chair.

# DRUMMOND to create the co-chair election ballot.


***** PRESENTATIONS/DISCUSSIONS *****

--- TYPED VARIABLES

This discussion was postponed to next week.

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/TypedVariables


--- XDI SPEC RULE NUMBERING

In our discussion about the Equivalence Links proposal below, we discussed an formatting approach to the XDI 1.0 specs where each of the spec docs would be be given an i-number, and every normative rule in each spec document would be given an i-number.

This unique form of dogfooding -- making the XDI specification documents XDI addressable -- would not just be appropriate for the XDI specs, but would serve as a direct illustration of how XDI works.

# DRUMMOND to add this to https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiOneSpecs (DONE)


***** DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL *****

This week's decision queue is the following set of proposals:

--- ABNF UPDATES

In addition to the previous proposal for a one-line change to the XDI ABNF to enable addressing of inner roots, Markus and Drummond are suggesting one other substantive change (not allowing a segment to start with a literal), and cosmetic changes that provide clear semantics for the different constructs used in XDI.

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf/Discussion
  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/InnerRoots

Markus explained the rationale behind no longer allowing a literal at the start of a segment. It eliminates ambiguity with the xref-IRI rule, and also eliminates the potential ambiguity of an XDI address starting with a pure literal (i.e., no XDI delimiter at the start).

We then had a long discussion about the xdi-pchar rule and what rules could be eliminated to simplify and speed up parsing.

We identified the following remaining issues to complete work on the ABNF:

1. Should colon be allowed as a literal character?
2. Should IRIs be syntactically delimited within cross-references by using a prefix delimiter such as a colon?
3. What are the minimum required escaping rules for IRIs within cross-references?
4. Should we specify a XDI address delimiter syntax for use in text editors, wikis, and other environments where an XDI address may appear?

# DRUMMOND will post these to https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf/Discussion

Drummond encourage discussion on the page above and the list in the coming week to lock the ABNF by next week’s meeting.

Markus also said that he found a new ABNF parser called APG that in his testing is roughly twice as fast as the previous one he was using.


--- EQUIVALENCE LINKS AND REFERENCE LINKS (DRUMMOND & MARKUS)

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/EquivalenceLinks

Bill said he had reviewed the proposal and was ready to move it into last call.

# DRUMMOND to move this proposal into Last Call. (DONE)


***** DECISION POINT QUEUE REVIEW *****

The decision queue stack is now shown on the following three auto-generated Category pages:

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryLastCall
  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryCurrent
  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryHighPriority

See also this list of proposals that need to be developed:

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiPendingIssues


***** NEXT CALL *****

The next call is next week at the regular time.