Comments on 29 Aug Draft of P&L was: Re: NEW VERSION of publishingAndLinking now

Mostly, I think this is a great start. Here are a few small comments, 
mostly editorial, that we may want to address before actually "hitting 
send" on the FPWD. I expect that most of these can be resolved by the 
editors without further discussion:

Abstract (editorial): "One particular mismatch discussed in this document 
between the Web and physical media is the way in which publication can 
happen without any judgment or review by Web subsystems based on actions of 
end-users, either by web intermediaries such as proxies, archives, search 
engines, or by content transformation services. " Seems like a run-on sentence.

Abstract (substantive, but not a serious concern): "Such sub-systems cannot 
exercise judgment, even if required to by governance." I'm sympathetic, but 
that's a bit too glib, I think. Systems are often programmed to implement 
what we might view as "judgement", in this sense. Indeed, we later say 
"Service providers that host particular types of material often employ 
automatic filters to prevent the publication of unlawful material, but it 
is impossible for a service provider to detect and filter out everything 
that might be unlawful." I'm fine with the spirit of what's in the 
abstract, which is that these systems are very limited in the sorts of 
"judgement" that might be practically implemented. I think the wording 
should be clarified to be a bit more nuanced.

1. Intro: (typo) "Where different kinds of entities interact, >there often 
with< conflicting goals[TUSSLE]."


For the future: I think that we should in future versions discuss the 
important role of https-scheme URIs and HTTPS, focusing especially on how 
it does (and doesn't) change our story about things like proxies.

I'd like to see at least the smaller points above addressed before this 
goes out, but if that's impractical or controversial, I'm OK going to FWPD 
now and sorting it out later. Thank you.

Noah

Received on Thursday, 30 August 2012 14:49:52 UTC