RE: [Fwd: Re: Approval of initial Dublin Core Interoperabiity Qualifiers]

I think the main problem is that the W3C web pages on URIs
are in disarray, and full of personal opinion without critical
review. There's no longer a link to http://www.w3.org/Addressing/
from  http://www.w3.org/Architecture/ any more, and the addressing
document's not in good shape. For example,

   A Beginner's Guide to URLs
	The classic intro to URLs, by The NCSA Mosaic team

is hardly a useful guide to URLs at this point in time; and
the document includes the continued confusion over the fact that
syntactically, URNs fit within the URL syntactic space.

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI seems to be based on
willful ignorance of economic reality-- that, for example,
companies don't change their domain names when they change
their company names, or that document authors might have
some control over the domain names available.

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes.html looks like some
notes that someone (Dan Connolly?) keeps in his spare time.
Probably if we got together we could put it into shape
in 3-4 hours of joint work.

I propose that we institute a W3C Activity that consists of
a URI coordination group that meets once to clean up the
existing material, and then meets quarterly (every 3 months)
for a maximum 1-hour phone conference to reviews the status
of the W3C web pages on URIs. Any standards work, documents,
etc, should be processed as IETF RFCs. In addition, we need
someone on W3C staff who has write access to the web pages and
is willing to spend ~30 minutes every 2 weeks updating the
web pages based on comments. I'd establish the write policy
at the initial meeting, but my proposal is for inclusion rather
than exclusion.

We might want to coordinate with IANA over the "official registry"
of URIs.

If we're concrete about the work plan, maybe we can get such
a minor activity by the W3C membership. It's a relatively small
amount of staff resources that it might be covered under other
"web site maintenance" activities, except for the scheduling and
coordination of the Coordination Group.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Sunday, 30 April 2000 17:58:47 UTC