Web site definition
From: Lavoie,Brian (lavoie@oclc.org)
Date: Mon, Jan 04 1999
Message-ID: <72B89459DD2BD211B5CD0000F840094E1074EB@oa3-server.dev.oclc.org>
From: "Lavoie,Brian" <lavoie@oclc.org>
To: "'www-wca@w3.org'" <www-wca@w3.org>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 17:12:40 -0500
Subject: Web site definition
Jim and Henrik,
I have some concerns about your definition of the term "Web site". In
particular, I'm not sure what the phrase "all Web pages and files under a
common owner" means. If this means all Web pages produced by a particular
entity (say, the W3C), I would think that this definition would be hard to
apply in practice, since authorship of Web documents can be difficult to
determine.
In my opinion, the only unambiguous way to define a Web site is as the set
of all Web pages (and I think your definition of this concept is a very good
one) that share a common host, defined by either the IP address, or
preferably, the domain name, if it exists. In this sense, any Web page can
be assigned to a unique Web site based only on information contained in the
URL. Perhaps this is what you meant in your definition.
Our research group has done some thinking about appropriate terminology for
Web entities. Some of this was presented at the workshop in November. If
interested, please visit:
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/projects/webstats/taxonomy.htm
Regards,
Brian Lavoie
OCLC