Re: Uniform access to descriptions

At 2:48 PM -0700 3/20/08, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>On Mar 20, 2008, at 1:17 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>>Roy T. Fielding scripsit:
>>>All of the hosting services that I have used over the past eight years
>>
>>I know Aunt Tillies, Aunt Tillies are friends of mine, and Roy, you're
>>no Aunt Tillie.
>
>Aunt Tillie is not relevant to "anyone who uses a hosting provider"
>and "It's impossible." assertions to which I was replying.

Well, its impossible for me. My IT manager refuses to allow me access 
to the files which I would need to access in order to follow the 
published W3C advice on how to arrange for a 303 redirect to happen. 
Now I know Im not a web maven by any means, but Im not completely 
stupid either; and after a great deal of sincere effort to find out 
some other way of doing it, I was unable to do so. After two weeks I 
gave up. None of the programmers of my acquaintance could figure out 
how to do it, either. So I cannot, in practice, follow the TAG 
recommendation. It might as well tell me to jump 30 feet in the air: 
with the best will in the world, I can't do it. I doubt if Aunt 
Tillie will be able to do any better.

>  Even so,
>if Aunt Tillie happens to be in a field in which this discussion
>is even remotely relevant, then she is more than capable of reading
>instructions on how to create links between documents (probably far
>more capable than the Uncle Tillies who think that is too difficult).

Creating links is easy. Writing code to generate http redirects is an 
entirely other scale of difficulty. Being allowed access to the files 
in which one might usefully put this code is tantamount to being 
given access to Fort Knox, in my experience.

>People who don't care about metadata at all are a different scope.
>
>Software doesn't need to be difficult for users.

Software isn't the problem. Management policies are the problem.

Pat
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