[VM] Telecon report - 2006-01-24

VM Telecon - 2006-01-24 - report
IRC: http://www.w3.org/2006/01/24-vmtf-irc

Next telecon: 2006-01-31

Present: Ralph Swick, Alistair Miles, Tom Baker (chair)

Resolved: To ask the SWBP Working Group at its Feb 6 telecon
to approve publication of a Working Draft [1].

The main outstanding technical issue is the fact that IE6 does
not explicitly request HTML content (i.e., "clickability" does
not work in IE6).  We discussed the two options -- to change the
default content type to HTML or to leave the recipes as is and 
live with a lack of clickability for IE6.

Bottom line: Changing the default to HTML could break existing
apps, which traditionally behave as if RDF were the default.
And we note that servers are not required to respect Accept
headers.  We therefore think that the Cookbook's stance should
be to support either HTML or RDF as the default.

Alistair thinks this might be done most elegantly by including
lines supporting HTML as the default in each of the recipes --
but commented out.  If cut and paste exactly "as is", each
recipe would default to RDF.  The accompanying text would
however explain how to uncomment lines to set the default
to HTML.  Commenting and uncommenting the lines in question
would "flip the switch" between a default of HTML and a default
of RDF.  Additional notes in the Appendix could suggest ways
to use User Agent to work around the lack of Accept headers
in picking an appropriate response.

In addition to the current five recipes, Alistair sees
the need for a Recipe Six -- if only a placeholder with
text outlining the problem -- for covering the scenario of
very large vocabularies, where instead of serving an entire
vocabulary in RDF one might want to serve bounded descriptions
of individual terms.  As the Cookbook would not provide a
recipe for this case, it is an open question how this issue
should be handled editorially.

Alistair is currently working on a new Editors' Draft [2].

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/http-examples/2005-11-18/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/http-examples/2006-01-18/

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                      baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de
SUB - Goettingen State                            +49-551-39-3883
and University Library                           +49-30-8109-9027
Papendiek 14, 37073 Göttingen

Received on Tuesday, 24 January 2006 16:56:14 UTC