Verifiable Credentials Working Group Special Topic Call on Outstanding Issues/PRs — Minutes

Date: 2024-01-16

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Brent Zundel, Hiroyuki Sano, Ted Thibodeau Jr., Andres Uribe, Dave Longley, Wesley Smith, Dmitri Zagidulin, Joe Andrieu, Gabe Cohen, Will Abramson

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Brent Zundel

Scribe(s): Andres Uribe

Content:

1. Privacy WG announcement.

Brent Zundel: Wes, welcome to the group.
… manu, can you talk through this?

Manu Sporny: W3C Privacy WG Charter: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2024Jan/0027.html.

Manu Sporny: Privacy WG announcement heads up. The W3C privacy charter is under vote. It closes in the next 24 hours.
… Their work is relevant across multiple groups.
… An official privacy group would carry more weight.
… Heads up that the vote is open and will close soon.

Brent Zundel: Do you know if the group is alongside the privacy interest group, or a replacement?

Manu Sporny: I don’t know. I thought the PING was going away and the new group would be the official group. The first document they’d deliver is “don’t resell my data” as an HTTP header.
… It’s similar to do-not-track, but designed with the new privacy regulations in mind.
… If PING stays around, it will act as a CG.
… The new group is expected to publish TR.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: “This proposed Working Group would replace the Interest Group.” is the last sentence of section 1 of the proposed charter.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: it’s in the charter that it’s replacing the interest group. There is also a community group.

Brent Zundel: Sounds like producing docs is the direction they’re heading.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: also – “Teleconferences: every 2 weeks, as needed, alternating with PrivacyCG meetings.” So CG and WG will coexist.

2. Bitstring Status List Issues.

Brent Zundel: https://github.com/w3c/vc-bitstring-status-list/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abefore-CR+sort%3Aupdated-asc.

2.1. TAG Review Request – Submitted (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#72)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#72.

Brent Zundel: Moving to our first issue. Goal is to share status, and to help forward as needed.
… have we heard back from TAG?

Manu Sporny: I don’t know. I was going to say 72 and 77 are tracking issues.
… We requested back in July. So we can proceed as they’ve timed out.

Brent Zundel: the request in the TAG github that was raised, it would be good to link to this issue.

Manu Sporny: See Relevant TAG issue.

Manu Sporny: It’s been reviewed already.
… They asked for pointers, we responded. They’re asking to schedule time in the f2f in London.

Brent Zundel: Good. Moving on.

2.2. Security and Privacy Questionnaire (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#77)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#77.

Brent Zundel: What’s the status?
… From PING or security?

Manu Sporny: I thought Kyle did a review on this; haven’t found the issue.

Brent Zundel: Not seeing issues.

Manu Sporny: Neither am I, perhaps they weren’t filed.

Brent Zundel: We need PING and Security requests raised.

Manu Sporny: I’ll take an action to do that.

2.3. Matching of VC issuer and Status List VC issuer - MAY vs MUST (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#124)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#124.

Manu Sporny: This was a request from dmitriz. They requested clarification from the spec, which is what PR 129 does. As a result, merging will address 124. TallTed has some minor fixups in the PR.

2.4. Remove ttl (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#120)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#120.

Brent Zundel: PR 128 is associated with this.

See github pull request vc-bitstring-status-list#128.

Manu Sporny: The PR marks the TTL property as at-risk. Allows us to go to CR. The assertion is that the “ttl” property and the “validUntil” property clash when they are both set.
… Seems like the “ttl” property should not exists.
… There is disagreement on that.

Dave Longley: There are conflicting semantics and likely layering violations. When would software look at ttl vs validUntil?
… Might be that the way TTL is done via HTTP headers instead of mixing it up with the credential data.

2.5. Add @type to encodedList term definition (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#125)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#125.

Brent Zundel: Has PRs, expected to be merged soon.

Manu Sporny: Want to highlight that we want to make possible for systems to compress this data.
… Status list might be hundreds of KB, plus bloat of encoding.
… This allows reduction by defining a type. This group defined multibase with a u prefix on it.
… We changed this from base64 with padding to base64 nopad.

2.6. “bitstring” vs “bit string” (issue vc-bitstring-status-list#127)

See github issue vc-bitstring-status-list#127.

Brent Zundel: We have time to talk about this.

Manu Sporny: As pointed by TallTed, there are two ways to refer to what we’re explaining: “Bit string” vs “Bitstring”.
… Both forms are fine. One is more popular.
… SEO, typing, and other arguments are weak.
… The changes require a lot of work from the editorial standpoint, for not much to gain.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: Having done some painful research on the PR on this, we started from “Bit String”, and it was arbitrarily changed to “Bitstring”.
… From web searching, both exists. The one word, redirects to the two word.

Dmitri Zagidulin: if we’re the only ones that use ‘bitstring’… that’s perfect SEO! that’s what we want!

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: They are usually consistent within a doc. It will be painful, and I grant that it will be painful at some point.
… The two word is more correct.

Dmitri Zagidulin: I posit that the one word is a feature, not a bug.

Joe Andrieu: I’m on the fence because I like plain English. But branding wise, bitstring seems better.

Manu Sporny: I don’t disagree.
… Given I just found out we haven’t submitted PING nor privacy, it could be we’re sitting in limbo for 3 months. That’s enough time to make the change.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: as far seo goes, vc bit string (note, no quoting, as most web searches go) is going to find them vc bitstring and vc bitstring is going to find them vc bit string …. the thing they really want SEO to work for is Verifiable Credentials, not bit string.

Manu Sporny: We just need closure. Either keep, or change it and do it.

Brent Zundel: The question on the table is: do we keep or change? If we change, who does the work?

Dave Longley: While we have the time, implementations are looking for stability.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: As far as SEO goes, both the one word and two words will show up in the search results; because most people don’t put searches in quotes.
… They’re likely going to put VC right next to the query, and are likely to quickly find what they’re looking for.

Brent Zundel: We’ve spent enough time on this today.
… Anything else?

Joe Andrieu: Would it need to be hyphenated when using the two words?

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: Both are nouns, so that could be confusing. Everything I’ve found treats it as an adjective.
… It could be hyphenated, but nothing I’ve found uses it that way.

Brent Zundel: That’s it, thanks all. Looks like we’re on track except for the PING & security reviews for bitstring.