Welcome, Yvonne

I’m delighted to say that my colleague Yvonne Wilson is now blogging! Yvonne has been responsible for making some of the toughest and most interesting technical and policy decisions in deploying our Sun Identity Provider for OpenID because of her responsibilities in Sun IT around our authentication and federated identity architecture. Some of us have been trying to persuade her to blog for quite some time now, and I’m hoping she’ll share her perspective on Sun’s OpenID initiative — along with many other topics on which she’s expert — in the coming weeks and months.

The three faces of user centricity

I had a dilemma this year when putting together my XML Summer School talk on federated identity technologies. Many of the delegates are IT-savvy but not familiar with modern notions of digital identity, much less with the bleeding edge of technology development and exploration, so I wanted to give them a useful sense of what’s necessary, what’s cool, and what’s still — or now especially — tricky when you sling identity across domains.

At this point, one can’t do justice to this topic without tackling “user centricity”. But since the term is used so imprecisely, I felt compelled to try and add some extra rigor so that delegates could measure their own situations against the state of the art. The exercise of observing how people wield “user centricity” led me to develop three use-case types.

(This post was getting wicked long, so I put the details after the jump. I’ve also uploaded the rather large PDF of my slides, which expand on many of the points I’m only touching on briefly here.)

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XML: the knit apparel analogy

Given the odd tech-and-stitching grooves I get into here, however did I miss this 1998 article??

XML is a simplified dialect of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). For those of you unfamiliar with SGML, it is an international standard (ISO-8879) for defining descriptions of the structure and content of documents in an electronic form. XML simplifies SGML by capturing about 80 percent of SGML’s functionality with only 20 percent of the complexity.

HTML, which is a description of the structure and content of a single type of document called a “Web page,” is just one instance of what can be created with SGML. In other words, if HTML is a single knit sweater, SGML and XML are how-to books on knitting. By learning XML, you can create sweaters, socks, leg warmers, or any kind of knitted apparel you want!

Not bad, though it misses the opportunity to capture the generative power of a single XML vocabulary. If instance:web page:sweater and model:HTML:sweater knitting pattern, then metamodel:XML:this. (Ooh, and maybe model building tool:XML schema IDE:this.)

From UFO to FO in a week

That’s “unfinished object” and “finished object”; I’ve been learning all that street talk by cruising the knitting pr0n sites. I’ve finished implementing a proof-of-concept that demonstrates I can turn cotton yarn into a useful tea-towelish piece of fabric using two pointy sticks. See?

Lauren not only caught me in the act of working on it at the Kings Arms near Wadham College, she’s the one who designed the cool basketweave pattern for me and helped me debug it along the way. She is a true expert and knits things like, oh, whole sweaters that actually fit and look attractive, sporting this item while in Oxford.

I had no idea knitting would be so mesmerizing and absorbing, even more so than crochet. Now I really have to figure out a second doable project so I can get my fix — bookmark? hanger cover? motorcycle?