- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2010 18:23:19 -0700
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
On Sep 3, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > 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. :) The page http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values defines relation names in terms of recent HTML practice and specs, mostly microformat specs. Relation names, however, are not media-type specific, and they have been around a lot longer than the source documents being used for that page. For example, XFN foolishly redefines many common relations (e.g., "child") and that page incorrectly treats XFN as authoritative (as opposed to listing all of the specifications that have defined "child"). It should be no surprise, therefore, that people outside of the microformats community do not consider it a valid registry of names for the Internet in general. Ian's "tests" were contrived to be rejected by the IANA registry just so that we could have this discussion again. It would be nice if we could quit playing games with the future of the Web. In fact, the registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.txt is already more complete and accurate than the microformats page, even though it is painfully ugly (what happened to the XHTML format?). What that evidence shows me is that the IANA registry is better for registering relation names than a wiki. I can only hope that they will fix the format issue soon. Meanwhile, I am sure that someone else here can manage to register any remaining (valid) relation names long before we resolve all the other problems with HTML5. ....Roy p.s. the XHTML version is supposed to look something like http://www.iana.org/assignments/icalendar/icalendar.xhtml
Received on Saturday, 4 September 2010 01:23:48 UTC