RE: Signalling to proxies

>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 14:57:04 UTC