Re: Attributes in Prelim DAV Spec

At 10:11 AM 11/1/96 PST, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>In message <96Nov1.064643pst."2760"@golden.parc.xerox.com>, Larry Masinter writ
>es:
>>Danger! Here Be Dragons!
>>
>># This group must define a fairly robust set of attributes. Else everyone
>># will invent their own and it will take forever before things sort
>># themselves out.
>>
>>Having been at the Dublin meeting that tried to define the Dublin core
>>and watched what's happened since, I think this would be a poor
>>choice: there's no reason to believe that _this_ group could converge
>>faster on an identical problem.
>
>PEP is designed to decentralize agreements about HTTP header
>semantics. It's possible we could define one or more HTTP
>extensions for our purposes, but avoid a central registry.
>
>I'd provide details, but I have to go right now. I'll try to
>say more next week.
>
>See:
>
>	http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/PEP/
>
>Dan
>

I'd like to chime in on Larry's side of this discussion.  There are several
other groups already engaged in defining core sets of attributes.  It seems
better to defer to their work than to start up another activity in that
area.  Most of this work is within the library community, and already they
have great difficulty agreeing on core attributes that are useful to
everyone.  Particular groups within that community need attributes
specialized to their work.  It is certainly true that the attributes needed
by large corporations for their intranets are a different set from the
library core attributes, and it will probably turn out that different
communities within corporations (human resources, finance, manufacturing,
research, marketing) need their own attribute sets, as do different sorts of
corporations.  So there will probably turn out to be lots of "core"
attribute sets for different communities.

The groups that work on these often propose syntax for expressing them as
well (MARC records, assorted SGML proposals, etc.), so we should at least
look at some of those proposals.

--Judy
Name:		Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:		slein@wrc.xerox.com
Phone:  	8*222-5169
Fax:		(716) 265-7133
MailStop:	128-29E

Received on Friday, 1 November 1996 19:00:09 UTC