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Activity Streams 2.0
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
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Expand the domain of `closed` to be applicable to more than just `Question`? #594

Open trwnh opened 2 months ago

trwnh commented 2 months ago

as:closed seems like it'd be useful on more than just Question types. say you had a comments section (represented by a Collection probably) and you wanted to declare it to be closed. is this semantically different enough to justify a completely different property? it also seems like it wouldn't work with the extension policy, since it would conflict with the existing definition for closed as as:closed.

tangentially, it seems like the intended usage of as:closed is kind of like marking a question as "solved". so maybe that deserves further thought.

steve-bate commented 2 months ago

The Question concept in AS2 seems to have never been fully thought through. See this, for example. However, I don't have the impression that as:closed for as:Question was intended to mean solved but that no further interaction is allowed (e.g., a poll that has been completed and no longer accepting responses).

Any AS2 Object can include predicates from any vocabulary. For example, they might include terms from schema.org. I don't see why they could not also include "extension" terms (relative to the base normative definition for that Object) from the AS2 vocabulary. In other words, they could use as:closed with as:Collection even if it's not defined as the domain for the as:closed predicate in the AS2 Recommendation.

trwnh commented 2 months ago

The Question concept in AS2 seems to have never been fully thought through. See https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/297#issuecomment-216636116, for example.

fair point, it also seems to indicate that closed was never thought through either. we have another issue in https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/542 regarding the range of the property (and of similar issues with the url property as defined in the context document). but closed being a boolean or a datetime or a graph node (Object/Link) seems like it's doing a lot of things. particularly the last case is what prompted my comment ("this Question is closed by (or closedBy?) the following object/link)

if the meaning truly were "no further interaction is allowed", then that would be imo an argument for making it more generic and loosening the domain restriction.

steve-bate commented 2 months ago

it also seems to indicate that closed was never thought through either

I agree with all those points.

evanp commented 2 months ago

This seems like a backwards-compatible change. It's not an error that requires an Errata, but I think it would require a text change.

So: roughly, if it is useful for other types, that needs some documentation. We can expand the domain to Object in a future version of the Vocabulary.

evanp commented 2 months ago

You can think of this as the decriminalization of using closed on other types, and then at some point we can legalize it.