It’s been a few months since our first CID Congress. We’re writing to share a few updates on our favourite forest of content addressed primitives:
- More Razzle-Dazzle: Beyond the original DASL specs for CIDs and CBOR shared at this meeting, there are now draft specs for RASL (retrieval), MASL (metadata, draft out very soon), BDASL (big dasl), and CAR all at dasl.ing.
- RASL in JS: There’s now an implementation of RASL for Node. It supports an Express middleware to respond to RASL queries with arbitrary backends, support for serving straight from a local directory, RASL URL parsing, and a RASL client.
- IETF: We are starting to draft a DASL RFC that we intend to bring to the IETF this summer. We feel that this describes useful real-world usage that is increasingly widespread, and is therefore relevant to the internet community.
- Data Utility Grants: We just announced a grants round for small-to-medium data utility projects: IPFS Implementation Fund. Of the 3 themes, 2 were directly inspired by these conversations. #2 is for a DASL test suite (which would also lend some more strength to the IETF submission), and #3 is for improvements to both recent and longtime libraries for working with content-addressed data. Thank you in advance for Bryan, Why, and Lidel who have agreed to join the review panel.
How you can contribute:
- Weigh in on open issues like #26 and others
- Consider these for your content-addressing use cases (especially newer ones like RASL or MASL) and give feedback on how it’s working and what’s missing.
- Spread the word about the Utility Grants (deadline March 30), especially to people who have recently published new CID/IPLD tooling. Here is a skeet you can share.
Mosh (@mosh) will be at ATMosphere Conf in Seattle March 22-23 if you want to chat about any of this in person.