Changed the term mediaType to encodingFormat

[iherman]

As agreed on the WG call to handle issue #1408.

See also related comment in #1438 (review).

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[iherman]

@msporny I am not sure how the SHA value of the context lands in the spec (in §B.1). Is it automatic, or should I generate it before merge?

[msporny]

@msporny I am not sure how the SHA value of the context lands in the spec (in §B.1). Is it automatic, or should I generate it before merge?

It's not automatic, and we really, really, should add some code (to respec?) to make it automatic. Doing that has been on my to-do list for over a year. I was thinking of adding it to the respec-vc tool. /cc @davidlehn :)

But for now, feel free to re-generate the hash by hand (or just leave it alone until we automate the process).

[iherman]

@msporny I am not sure how the SHA value of the context lands in the spec (in §B.1). Is it automatic, or should I generate it before merge?

It's not automatic, and we really, really, should add some code (to respec?) to make it automatic. Doing that has been on my to-do list for over a year. I was thinking of adding it to the respec-vc tool. /cc @davidlehn :)

But for now, feel free to re-generate the hash by hand (or just leave it alone until we automate the process).

I prefer not to do it, because I am not 100% sure I would produce the right value, and that would be worse. In a way, it does not matter so much; this is a new CR draft; what is important to get these values right by PR (there are also hashes for the vocabulary files).

[TallTed]

Suggested change

	`resource`. If a `encodingFormat` is included, its value
	`resource`. If an `encodingFormat` is included, its value

[selfissued]

I oppose changing from mediaType, which is a well-known term, to encodingFormat, which we'd be making up.

[iherman]

The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2024-02-21

• no resolutions were taken

View the transcript

3.2. Changed the term mediaType to encodingFormat (pr vc-data-model#1440)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1440.

Ivan Herman: We had a call on this issue. We decided to change the term "Media Type" to "Encoding Format".

See github issue vc-data-model#1408.

Ivan Herman: Discussions are ongoing.
… We shouldn't spend that much time on this.

Manu Sporny: The goal is for activity streams to be able to use this without changes.
… We may just be incompatible with the activity streams context.
… If changing this one thing doesn't fix it, then we shouldn't make the change, since the problem wouldn't be addressed.
… The way activity streams and schema.org define the context are neither right.
… We probably don't want to do this.
… Maybe we should define IANA media type and have it refer to the IANA registry.
… I'm leaning towards that being my preference.
… The downside is that we're creating yet another term.

Ivan Herman: Note that the two things you mentioned are orthogonal to one another.
… What term should we use?
… Should we define it ourselves?

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: ianaMediaType was my idea, fwiw. its domain & range remain vital.

Ivan Herman: The definition of a data type for media types can be added.
… It's not a huge deal.
… I question altogether whether we should do.

Dave Longley: another option is to go with encodingFormat today and then potentially add ianaMediaType or mediaType in a future WG.

Michael Jones: It would be strange to change from a term that is well known "media type" to "encoding format", which we'd be entirely making up.

Ivan Herman: We are not making it up, schema.org defined it.

Michael Jones: That's not authoritative for us.

Ivan Herman: That's debatable.

Manu Sporny: Dmitri is on the call and is chairing the Social Web Community Group.

Dmitri Zagidulin: We're the ones shepherding the activity streams formats.
… We want to be able to sign activity streams objects.

Manu Sporny: We shouldn't use schema.org.
… We shouldn't use activity pub.
… We should point to IETF and IANA and get this right once and for all.
… It probably shouldn't go in our vocabulary.
… It could go in our security vocabulary.
… We should call it something that people understand.

Ivan Herman: See IANA pointer.

Ivan Herman: I have put this pointer into the minutes.
… From an RDF point of view, would the pointer be the URL of the property?
… I don't really like that.
… Instead we can define a media type for RDF.
… This is where the string format is defined.
… We define a property in one of our vocabularies.

Manu Sporny: I wouldn't object to that.
… But we'd be repeating what the social web and schema.org did and we'd be creating another property.

Ivan Herman: I don't know exactly how activity streams defined it.
… If its compatible with IANA, we could use it.
… If Dmitri gives me a pointer to the definition, I could look at it.

Manu Sporny: It's defined here: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-mediatype.

Dmitri Zagidulin: What's the objection to reusing the mediaType definition?

Manu Sporny: They made it too specific to activity streams (by defining domain restrictions).

Dmitri Zagidulin: That could be changed so it can be applied to any domain.

Ivan Herman: That would be perfect.

Dmitri Zagidulin: We could change that.

Michael Jones: It's not clear to me, are we taking a dependence on an externally defined vocabulary?

Manu Sporny: We already point to a bunch of externally defined vocabularies.
… We'd be reusing the URL they use for the definition.
… This would be more correct than using the schema.org encoding.
… We could actually call this media type.

David Lehn: ?Question?
… Equivalency checking.

Manu Sporny: agree with Dmitri, I don't think this is an issue to re-use AS as long as it's aligned.

David Lehn: How much do people do full RDF processing?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Zero.

Brent Zundel: The proposal to raise an issue on the activity streams repository sounds right.
… For our PR, the consensus is to not merge that PR.

Ivan Herman: I'm happy to close it.
… Who has the action to raise the PR in the right place?

Brent Zundel: I'm willing to do it but I'm not sure I could accurately reflect what we want.

Ivan Herman: I'm willing to do it.

Michael Jones: The activity streams repository is https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/.

[iherman]

Per https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/Meetings/Minutes/2024-02-21-vcwg#section3-2 closing without merge.