This section is non-normative.| solidproject.org
Web services emerged in the late 1990s as a way to access specific pieces of remote functionality, building on the standards-driven stability brought by the universal protocol that HTTP was readily becoming. Interestingly, the Web itself has drastically changed since. During an era of unprecedented centralization, almost all of our data relocated to remote systems, which appointed Web APIs as the exclusive gateways to our digital assets. While the legal and socio-economic limitations of such ...| ruben.verborgh.org
We’re living in a data-driven economy, and that won’t change anytime soon. Companies, start-ups, organizations, and governments all require some of our data to provide us with the services we want and need. Unfortunately, decades of Big Data thinking has led many companies to a consequential fallacy: the belief that they need to harvest and maintain that personal data themselves in order to deliver their services and thus survive in the data-driven economy. This prompted a never-ending ra...| ruben.verborgh.org
Ever since Ed Sheeran’s 2017 hit, I just can’t stop thinking about shapes. It’s more than the earworm though: 2017 is the year in which I got deeply involved with Solid, and also when the SHACL recommendation for shapes was published. The problem is a very fundamental one: Solid promises the separation of data and apps, so we can choose our apps independently of where we store our data. The apps you choose will likely be different from mine, yet we want to be able to interact with each ...| ruben.verborgh.org
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed bac...| ruben.verborgh.org
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. This document describes the overall architecture of HTTP, establishes common terminology, and defines aspects of the protocol that are shared by all versions. In this definition are core protocol elements, extensibility mechanisms, and the "http" and "https" Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes. This document updates RFC 3864 and obsoletes RFCs 2...| www.rfc-editor.org