Very rough draft of TAG finding on self-describing documents

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been interested for some time in doing 
a finding on the importance of self-describing documents on the Web.  In 
fact, I started noodling on a draft over a year ago, then put it down for 
awhile.  Now that Henry is working actively on XML Functions, I'm moved to 
get back to this.  In short, I'm proposing that we do an overall finding 
about the importance of self description, and point to Henry's work in the 
particular case that what you've got is a representation of media type 
application/xml.

Right now, self-describing Web is languishing as a sub issue of the 
all-purpose ultimateQuestion-42 [1].  I propose that we elevate it to a 
full-fledged issue of its own, albeit closely coordinated with 
xmlFunctions-34 [2].

More to the point, this note is to announce a very, very rough sketch of a 
draft finding on the importance of self-describing Web documents.  It's 
publicly available at [3].  Please take a look.  I would like to devote 
some time to exploring this at the TAG F2F in early March.

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#ultimateQuestion-42
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#xmlFunctions-34
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments.html

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 03:41:33 UTC