Re: Report on testing of the link relations registry

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 6:27 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
> The idea that registries should trawl the world looking for usages, guess what they are and what they mean, invent definitions and specifications to back up those guesses, is, if you think about it, rather bizarre.  But I can't think what else you are suggesting (well, maybe telepathy) if the registry is to be criticized for not containing things that no-one has tried to register.

It's not the operators of the registry who will be looking for changes
-- it will be its *users*.  On a wiki, any user who sees anything
wrong can fix it with almost no effort.  That's how wikis work, and it
works really well.  You put an "edit" link on every single page, maybe
an "add an entry" link at prominent points on your list, and your
*viewers* will keep it up to date.  Again, if reliability is a problem
in practice, a separate stable version can be maintained that a
largish group of trusted people sync to the untrusted version
regularly after review (e.g., daily).

We are not evaluating the effectiveness of the IANA's registry in a
vacuum.  We are comparing it to a well-tested alternative, namely, a
wiki.  Evidence suggests that the wiki-based microformats.org registry
is much more up-to-date than most IANA registries, so in that sense,
it works much better.  At this point, I'm not clear what your concrete
objections are to using a wiki.  The incredulity at the idea that web
pages can be kept up to date without anyone following some formal
submission process is hard for me to understand, given the success of
wikis in the last several years, but as a MediaWiki developer, maybe
I'm biased.  :)

Received on Friday, 3 September 2010 20:04:55 UTC