Today I discovered an interesting inconsistency in Activity Streams specs while investigating a Fedify issue.

The question: How should we interpret URLs like "icon": "https://example.com/avatar.png"?

JSON-LD context (https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams @type: "@id" → “This is an IRI reference, dereference it to fetch an ActivityStreams object.”

Activity Streams Primer: “assume that a bare string is the href of a Link object, not an id” (no dereferencing)

Result: JSON-LD processor-based implementations try to parse PNG files as JSON and fail.

Turns out w3c/activitystreams#595 already discusses the same issue for href properties. I added a note that icon, image, etc. have the same problem.

Once again reminded of how tricky spec work can be…

#ActivityPub #Fedify #ActivityStreams #fedidev #specifications

In #WebFinger, are there any relations that use the template property instead of the href property, excluding the http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe relation?

#fedidev