Re: Signalling to proxies

I seem to recall that there was a discussion about specifically being 
chartered to find a replacement for robots.txt - maybe it never made it 
into the charter in the end.

Either way I think the point is that robots.txt is to be found in the 
root of a Web site, but since we don't know what a Web site is (in terms 
  of determining from two URIs whether they belong to the same Web site 
or not) there isn't a clear way of determining what the URI of the root is.

Jo

On 31/10/2008 15:53, Rotan Hanrahan wrote:
> It would be interesting to see what arguments were made to say that
> well-known locations were "bad practice", and what criteria were offered
> to assess whether an alternative would be "better". To me, simplicity is
> a pretty good criterion.
> 
> I went searching for the possible reference to this "concern" in the
> POWDER charter and linked material, but didn't find anything. Perhaps I
> need to look harder.
> 
> ---Rotan.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jo Rabin [mailto:jrabin@mtld.mobi] 
> Sent: 31 October 2008 15:03
> To: Rotan Hanrahan
> Cc: Francois Daoust; public-bpwg-ct; public-powderwg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Signalling to proxies
> 
>  > Thanks for the P3P reference, Francois. It further supports the
>  > viability of the practice of "well known locations".
> 
> IIRC one of the points made to the proto-POWDER group (might even be in 
> the POWDER charter, actually) was that well known locations are regarded
> 
> as "bad practice" and that they needed to find some other mechanism.
> 
> Jo
> 
> On 31/10/2008 14:56, Rotan Hanrahan wrote:
>> From bitter experience, there are two rules to follow regarding the
>> creation of vocabularies:
>>
>> 1. You've underestimated the effort, so increase your estimate.
>> 2. See 1.
>>
>> To re-emphasise, I'm not suggesting that either groups copied on this
>> message take on board the task of addressing this issue. Nevertheless,
>> comments on the merits, demerits, feasibility and challenges are very
>> welcome, and hopefully will encourage someone somewhere to actually do
>> some work on it.
>>
>> Thanks for the P3P reference, Francois. It further supports the
>> viability of the practice of "well known locations".
>>
>> Good luck with the race to Rec (to both groups!).
>>
>> ---Rotan.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Francois Daoust [mailto:fd@w3.org] 
>> Sent: 31 October 2008 14:48
>> To: Rotan Hanrahan
>> Cc: Jo Rabin; public-bpwg-ct; public-powderwg@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Signalling to proxies
>>
>> Rotan Hanrahan wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Yes, I accept that the charter prohibits the creation of new
>> technology,
>>> and I openly admit that I placed the idea into the CT forum mainly
>>> because the audience is right, despite the charter limitation. I
>> copied
>>> the POWDER group because I hope that this use case will get some
>>> prominence, and maybe through a formalised example it might actually
>> be
>>> adopted. After all, Robots is not an official standard and look how
>>> successful it has been.
>> I think there are three separate things here:
>>
>> 1/ the use of POWDER, and POWDER is indeed not an existing technology
>> yet.
>>
>> The CT Task Force chose to mention the use of POWDER in the "Scope for
> 
>> Future Works" appendix for that reason. We felt (how naive one can be 
>> sometimes ;)) that going to Rec would be quick and easy and that we 
>> would have been slowed down by a dependency on POWDER. I'm not quite 
>> sure today that the Content Transformation Guidelines will beat POWDER
> 
>> in the race to REC, but I don't think we should revisit that decision 
>> anyway.
>>
>>
>> 2/ the definition of a core vocabulary that a server could use in its 
>> POWDER file(s) to communicate with a content transformation proxy. I 
>> guess there is "new technology" and "new technology", and that one
> could
>> argue that a vocabulary is not exactly a new technology.
>>
>> Again, the CT Task Force decided against it because it still looks
> like 
>> new technology.
>>
>> However, were this exercise be done and the results brought to our 
>> knowledge, I think we could reasonably (at least try to) incorporate 
>> them in the guidelines without triggering an apocalypse.
>>
>> That's just my personal take on this. I still think we, the CT Task 
>> Force, should not work on that. My real fear is that defining and 
>> agreeing on a core vocabulary is not an easy exercise at all. Am I too
> 
>> pessimistic?
>>
>>
>> 3/ the definition of a well-known location to place a POWDER file. 
>> Probably not a big deal if it's not standardized right away,
> especially 
>> since we may still use the Link element for the time being. I note the
> 
>> notion of well-known locations is used by the P3P spec for example:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-P3P-20020416/#Well_Known_Location
>>
>> Francois.

Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 15:59:40 UTC