Re: Uniform access to descriptions

I'm happy to give Aunt Tillie, who I take to be another victim of  
your IT department, a place at the table in this discussion. We  
should enumerate solutions that are accessible to her and evaluate  
them relative to others. But I want to be clear what problem we're  
talking about. I don't think anyone is proposing to eliminate in- 
document metadata, or to eliminate 303. (There exist arguments  
against in-document metadata, but that's another story.) I'm just  
suggesting that we look at *alternative* uniform "channels" for  
providing metadata, because sometimes you can't or don't want to put  
it in the document (like maybe it's not a document and 303 is not to  
your taste, or the format doesn't have a place to put metadata, or  
any of the other 5 or so situations previously discussed).

I can see why you might want to look for a solution to Aunt Tillie's  
non-document non-303 non-# description problem through this  
discussion. Although I'm not a big fan of 303s, this is an angle I  
hadn't thought of.

A URI manipulation convention such as Alan Ruttenberg's idea from  
last summer [1] would work for Aunt Tillie since it doesn't require  
any header or status code magic. Another solution would be a central  
registry or a set of registries. (I'm not saying these ideas aren't  
without faults.) What would you suggest?

Jonathan

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2007Jul/ 
0109.html