Re: Problems and Opportunities at purl.org

Happy to help with this in whatever way it makes sense.  Having a simpler
interface for the typical use cases might be a good thing.  But we would
need to make it bullet-proof.  A service like this becomes indispensable
quickly.  And then we run into the situation where some innocuous-seeming
change messes up the world for others.  Not good.

I have been following this thread, but without digging back into it... do
we have access to the data from purl.org so we *could* port it over?



On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 5:11 AM, Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> David and Jason, hello.
>
> On 11 Nov 2015, at 1:41, David Wood wrote:
>
> I actually agree with Jason - but think we need an optional UI for
>> non-technical users on top of the GitHub interface.
>>
>
> Not just for non-technical users, perhaps.
>
> The w3id.org solution of letting everyone customise a pile of .htaccess
> files is a very smart one, because it let w3id.org get up quickly, but I
> hope it's just seen as an interim solution.
>
> At present, I can apparently use _anything_ from mod_rewrite in there,
> which gives me a great deal of scope for being Clever, which would be a
> vice.  It would also tie w3id.org to Apache, or at least to a mod_rewrite
> work-a-like for all eternity, so may not be an optimal archival solution.
>
> A pile of .htaccess files is a fine implementation technology, but not, I
> think, an interface.
>
> As an alternative, one could imagine something as simple as a CSV file:
>
>     /people/nxg/myurl,http://example.org/foo/myurl
>     /people/nxg/tree1/*,http://example.org/bar/$$/index.html
>     /people/nxg/tree2/([a-z]*)-v([0-9*),
> http://example.org/baz/$1/version-$2
>
> Put angle brackets round that and call it XML, or curly brackets and call
> it JSON, and you're up-to-the-minute.  And technology-agnostic.
>
> Something like that could be prepared (on- or off-line), uploaded,
> validated, and journaled, quite easily perhaps.
>
> One could also take a great deal of useful inspiration from DNS zone files.
>
> Also, as a more general point, I consider myself a technical user, but
> I... am not a fan of git.  Not a fan.  A not-fan.  Not, by any means or in
> any sense, an Enthusiast.
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Norman
>
>
> --
> Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>
>


-- 
Shane McCarron
Managing Director, Applied Testing and Technology, Inc.