Re: Some thoughts on a new publication approach

On 2013/10/28 10:40, Karl Dubost wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> strong words,

Yes, sorry about that, but it was the best way I could come up to 
express what I feel.

> let me try to clarify a few things. :)
>
> Le 27 oct. 2013 à 01:06, Martin J. Dürst<duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>  a écrit :
>> I don't think we should do the search engines' work.
>
> Yes we can. :)
> See that as a two folds thing: On search engines out there, we have little to no control on their ranking algorithm, search strategy, etc.  On a local search engine you could perfectly make everything browsable and searchable in the way that they make sense to your information architecture.
>
> See for example the W3C mailing-list search engine.
>
>> Even more, this proposal, as far as I understand it, would essentially make it impossible to go search for "foo-tech Last Call".
>
> It depends on what you call impossible. If you think about using the common search engines,

Yes, that's what I mean by "go search for". I'd guess that a very high 
percentage of people, if the search wouldn't show a Last Call for 
foo-tech, would just give up with the conclusion that there never was a 
Last Call for foo-tech.

> the answer is yes. If you rely on a local search engine or even your own then no, there is no issue.

Of course if you don't hide it, then you can find it. But who uses the 
local search engine unless they just happen to be on a page that has a 
local search field?

>> That would be bad. I'm not exactly sure how to express this, but in some way, tweaking robots.txt for this feels like censorship to me.
>
> nope. Censorship is removing content entirely.

Censorship can never be complete. So it feels at least like a step 
towards censorship.

> There is still access to old versions. Through linking, nobody forbids you to browse them and even collect them. I think I have the full TR space until 2008.

It's not about you and me. We know where things are, which is the newest 
version,... anyway.

But I feel that if we think we have to use robots.txt in an attempt to 
make people use the newest version, we have failed.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 28 October 2013 04:38:23 UTC