W3C TAG Finding "The Self-Describing Web" has been published

I am pleased to announce that the W3C TAG has published a new Finding  
titled "The Self-Describing Web" [1].

Abstract
The Web is designed to support flexible exploration of information by  
human users and by automated agents. For such exploration to be  
productive, information published by many different sources and for a  
variety of purposes must be comprehensible to a wide range of Web  
client software, and to users of that software.

HTTP and other Web technologies can be used to deploy resource  
representations that are self-describing: information about the  
encodings used for each representation is provided explicitly within  
the representation. Starting with a URI, there is a standard algorithm  
that a user agent can apply to retrieve and interpret such  
representations. Furthermore, representations can be what we refer to  
as grounded in the Web, by ensuring that specifications required to  
interpret them are determined unambiguously based on the URI, and that  
explicit references connect the pertinent specifications to each  
other. Web-grounding ensures that the specifications needed to  
interpret information on the Web can be identified unambiguously. When  
such self-describing, Web-grounded resources are linked together, the  
Web as a whole can support reliable, ad hoc discovery of information.

This finding describes how document formats, markup conventions,  
attribute values, and other data formats can be designed to facilitate  
the deployment of self-describing, Web-grounded Web content.

Although some of this finding deals with technical details, much of   
it is intended to be useful to anyone who is interested in learning  
how to create documents for the Web, how to better administer Web  
servers, or who may be preparing specifications for new technologies  
or media-types to be integrated with the Web.  As the editor of this  
finding, I would like to thank the many members of the Web community  
who have taken the trouble to read and comment on draft versions of  
this finding.

A complete list of TAG findings, both approved and in draft state, is  
available at [2].  Also, the TAG has earlier made available "The  
Architecture of the World Wide Web" [3], which is intended as a  
comprehensive introduction to the Web's architecture, and which may  
also be of interest to readers of the newly published Finding.  Thank  
you.

Noah Mendelsohn
W3C TAG Chair

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/findings
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/

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Noah Mendelsohn
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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