Re: There Are No Metadocuments

Terry Allen wrote:
> 
> These "metadocuments" sound to me exactly like "the real, full
> document with all its trimmings."  I know SGMLllers are used to thinking
> about the marked-up text as distinct from the style sheet, etc.,
> but for the purposes of publishing that text, the whole ball of
> stuff can be considered to be not document+meta, but just
> document (including some meta, nothing wrong with that).

Yeah verily!

This is the "minimally constraining" view -- it allows folks
to manage data however they choose -- lump the content and
the metadata together, or store them separately and link
them.

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Axioms of Web Architecture: 2 
Tim Berners-Lee 
Date: Januray 6, 1997 
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/DesignIssues/Metadata.html

Documents, Metadata, and Links

The thing which you get when you follow a link, when you de-reference
a URI, has a lot of names. Formally we call it a resource. Sometimes it
is
referred to as a document because many of the things currently on the
Web are human readable documents. Sometimes it is referred to as an
object when the object is something which is more machine readable in
nature or has hidden state. I will use the words document and resource
interchangeably in what follows and sometimes may slip into using
"object". 

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See also: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Architecture/Terms#document

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 1997 10:10:18 UTC