Tim Finin (finin@cs.umbc.edu)
Wed, 23 Apr 2003 14:38:02 -0400
This article on the W3C Technical Architecture Group
(TAG)
http://admin.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/16/deviant.html
discusses a problem and potential solution that might
the germ of a good 771 project.
"...
Metadata for Web Sites
The last new TAG issue I want to address concerns the
jumble of different ways to establish site-wide metadata,
including conventional URIs like
http://a.site.org/robots.txt
http://a.site.org/w3c/p3p
http://a.site.org/favicon.png
One might also add to this mix the panoply of site-wide
metadata uses to which RSS files are now routinely being
put. In Tim Berners-Lee's formulation, the task is to
find a solution, or put in place steps for a solution
to be found, which allows the metadata about a site,
including that for later applications, to be found with
the minimum overhead and no use of reserved URIs within
the server space.
Tim Bray suggested a straw man proposal, which not only
proposes a new HTTP header, but also takes a step toward
formalizing web sites as a kind of distinct entity. As
Tim says,
let's introduce a formal notion of a "Web Site",
which is a collection of Resources, each identified by URI.
A resource can be in more than one site -- not an obvious
choice, but it seems it would be hard to enforce a rule to
the contrary.
Since a Web Site is an interesting and important thing, it
ought to be a resource and ought to have a URI. There is no
point trying to write any rules about whether all the resources
on a site ought to be on the same host or whether the site's URI
should look like those of the resources."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed Apr 23 2003 - 14:38:27 EDT
