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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

This is really annoying as the technical term for the identifier of a phone number--one of the most prototypical centralized identifiers--is also a "DID": a Direct Inward Dialing (number, but we don't say "number"). So now "in the future, people won't tell each other their DID to let people call them, they will give them their DID" :/.

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I don't think this is very well-known, at least among people who haven't worked on telephony implementations (? I have no idea where this is commonly used). Never in my life has someone asked me for my DID instead of my phone number.

It's fairly plausible that the people working on this specification were unaware of this pre-existing acronym (which ranked after Defense In Depth, when I searched it), and just said "Oh, we're making Distributed IDentifiers. Let's call them DIDs! That's easy to remember."

When used in verbal conversation, is it generally spelled out like CPU (dee eye dee), or said as a word like RAM (did)?

at the two telecom jobs in my past DID only got called a "DID" when specifically talking about configuring routes for DID or some other associated configuration. Even as telecom engineers unless that was the specific context the nomenclature was to call it a phone number all other times. Across separate companies.

And yet ...

...you've got me wanting to pay attention to something; I'm migrating from a public telco/PTSN job to The world of hosted pbx and managed voice in two weeks and I wonder if that linguistic quirk translates between the two types of environment.

Even better, a phone DID is a very centralized identifier, whereas this refers to a decentralized identifier.

Does anybody care what the W3C think anymore? I was under the impression that the WHATWG was formed due to the browser developers’ frustrations with the W3C and they now mostly ignore what W3C says or does. So, what are the chances of this actually catching on?

W3C is the coordination point for WebAssembly: https://www.w3.org/wasm/

Personally, I think WebAssembly is going to massively revolutionize app delivery. In ten years we will have all but forgotten about JavaScript, switching instead to client-side apps that run at near binary-native speeds, written in real languages with complete type systems.

Ah, thanks, I didn’t know that WebAssembly was a W3C drive. Good to know they still have relevance.

For pure browser stuff maybe. The W3C still puts out some very very useful resources and standards not directly browser related that are important (such as AP and Micropub)

AP isn't relevant because of W3C, AP is relevant because Mastodon is relatively popular.

AP was developed in conjuction with Mastodon developers and as part of one of the reference implementations.

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