[w3c-wai-er-ig] <none>

I follow the rdf-interest group list and have been proposing the "Palmer 
Method" for including RDF/indexing information in a file pointed to by the 
<head profile="myinfo.xml"> element. This would be a good place to include 
the who/when/what/why/how information in the form of RDF assertions, 
including a claim of conformance in whatever detail we could envision - 
sort of like the Accessibility Description Language thing Len proposed. 
Since one can have more than one profile URI, there are other 
possibilities, but the opportunity to achieve signivicant indexing at 
essentially no cost is compelling.

Because there is a certain amount of "security" and "trust" due to the file 
being in the author's password-protected space, this would be a great 
opportunity. One of the regulars on the list, Seth Russell wrote:

"I think every web authoring tool should include a standard feature where you
choose a questionnaire before you click save. People would be naturally 
motivated
to answer the questionnaire because they want their pages indexed. The save
function would automatically include the RDF descriptions in the file. And 
there
should be a way to motivate the librarian types among us to write the
questionnaires."

That resonates with what we've been talking about - and it could be started 
this week! No special languages/protocols/recommendations - just a little 
formatting and it doesn't have to be bulletproof because if there's RDF in 
there it can be mined for rather readily. No DTDs, no schemas, just a file 
containing certain simple formatted statements. It can grow without having 
a major backward compatability problem and it will be fairly simple to 
design forward compatability into it.

If nobody finds a *fatal flaw* we already have an example in place: 
http://rdf.pair.com/xchecker.htm which has in it:

"<head profile="rdfprofile.xml">

If you call up that profile in IE 5.5 or NS 6.3 it displays the contents in 
a way that makes it evident that any reasonably sane RDF tool would be able 
to extract the appropriate information.

Am I missing something? We could even "appropriate" some file extension 
like .idx or whatever and establish a precedent if needed.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Friday, 24 November 2000 22:03:50 UTC