Evaluate wot-typescript-definitions as dependency

[relu91]

As mentioned in WebThingsIO/gateway#2806 (comment) W3C now publish the official schema and its corrective Typescript types in a npm package. I was wondering if, in the near future, it would be better for the addons and the gateway to depend upon this official schema rather than the one defined here.

[relu91]

One problem is that wot-typescript-definitions contains also the type for the Scripting API, plus it is not clear which version of the thing description schema is contained. Perhaps it might make a new package dedicated only to the schema+ td typescript types.

[benfrancis]

My understanding is that this repository contains schemas for the IPC messages sent between add-ons and the gateway which, although happen to follow a similar data model for convenience, are not necessarily intended to follow any W3C standard.

What is your thinking in using the W3C repo as a dependency? Is there a subset of the schemas in this repo which could be replaced by the W3C ones?

[relu91]

I was thinking about this particular file: https://github.com/WebThingsIO/gateway-addon-ipc-schema/blob/master/messages/definitions.json (which is the one that I need to edit in WebThingsIO/gateway#2811). In my understanding that file is basically a 1-1 schema definition for Thing Descriptions.

My hypothesis here is that it would be much cleaner to have an entry in the packaged JSON that states wot-thing-description : 1.1.x-y. We gain in readability and maintainability (cause we outsource the schema definition). I would only do this when the package actually contains just the schema plus the TS definitions. Let's see how w3c/wot-scripting-api#327 goes.