Re: [Fwd: Re: Approval of initial Dublin Core Interoperabiity Qualifiers]

Larry Masinter wrote:
 >
 > I think the main problem is that the W3C web pages on URIs
 > are in disarray, and full of personal opinion without critical
 > review.

I'm not sure what you mean by "disarray" but the vast majority
of the W3C web site is "personal opinion without critical review."

 > There's no longer a link to http://www.w3.org/Addressing/
 > from  http://www.w3.org/Architecture/

Yes, there is; the link text is
	Naming and Addressing (URIs)

Are we looking at the same page? The one I'm looking at has
	last revised $Date: 2000/04/13 20:33:14 $ by $Author: hoschka $
in the signature.

 > any more, and the addressing
 > document's not in good shape. For example,
 >
 >   A Beginner's Guide to URLs
 >         The classic intro to URLs, by The NCSA Mosaic team
 >
 > is hardly a useful guide to URLs at this point in time;

No? Why not? By google's unbiased metrics
(cf http://www.google.com/why_use.html), it's the
2nd most relevant page in the Web to the query "URL introduction"

http://www.google.com/search?q=URL+introduction&num=10&meta=hl%3Den%26lr%3D

 > and
 > the document includes the continued confusion over the fact that
 > syntactically, URNs fit within the URL syntactic space.

It is a fact that each URN, for example,
	urn:abc:def
fits within the URL syntactic space. I don't understand what you
mean by "continued confusion". Please explain in detail.

 > http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI seems to be based on
 > willful ignorance of economic reality-- that, for example,
 > companies don't change their domain names when they change
 > their company names, or that document authors might have
 > some control over the domain names available.

We're completely aware that companies change their domain names;
but we maintain that it's cost-effective to maintain the old addresses
rather than to break the incoming links.

There are likely to be reasonable exceptions, but the Web
could hardly suffer from a few more webmasters keeping
this guideline rather than breaking incoming links
for no good reason.

 > http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes.html looks like some
 > notes that someone (Dan Connolly?) keeps in his spare time.

Again, like most of the W3C web site, it's maintained
in an ad-hoc fashion, yes. But it's useful to me and
at least a few other people, and I have never seen
anything elsewhere in the Web that gives this
information, so I keep it around.

 > Probably if we got together we could put it into shape
 > in 3-4 hours of joint work.

There's a standing invitation:

	"If you know of any that aren't here, please tell me via the relevant
forums."
	-- http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes.html

By all means, if you have contributions to the page,
send them here (to uri@w3.org).


 > I propose that we institute a W3C Activity that consists of
 > a URI coordination group that meets once to clean up the
 > existing material, and then meets quarterly (every 3 months)
 > for a maximum 1-hour phone conference to reviews the status
 > of the W3C web pages on URIs. Any standards work, documents,
 > etc, should be processed as IETF RFCs. In addition, we need
 > someone on W3C staff who has write access to the web pages and
 > is willing to spend ~30 minutes every 2 weeks updating the
 > web pages based on comments. I'd establish the write policy
 > at the initial meeting, but my proposal is for inclusion rather
 > than exclusion.

Well... given that we do this maintenance already, more or
less, I'm interested in the possibility of more involvement from
the W3C membership; I haven't managed to make a good case for it yet.
A quarterly teleconference is an interesting idea, but I don't
see obvious criteria for membership; do you have something in
mind?


 > We might want to coordinate with IANA over the "official registry"
 > of URIs.
 >
 > If we're concrete about the work plan, maybe we can get such
 > a minor activity by the W3C membership. It's a relatively small
 > amount of staff resources that it might be covered under other
 > "web site maintenance" activities, except for the scheduling and
 > coordination of the Coordination Group.
 >
 > Larry
 > --
 > http://larry.masinter.net

--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Monday, 8 May 2000 14:05:11 UTC