- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 15:38:00 -0800
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
- Cc: "Ron Daniel Jr." <rdaniel@lanl.gov>
Ron, thank you for posting your draft to the group, as I'm sure it will spark some valuable discussion on metadata packaging issues. >There is an example in there that shows why people might want >to use multipart/related for WEB-DAV. It doesn't talk about why people >might want to break metainformation into packages, but if someone >really wants me to say why that is (IMHO) vital, press my hot button. Press. This issue is very relevant to WEBDAV right now. As near as I can tell, by packaging you sacrifice some ability to perform content negotiation (e.g., the case where the natural language used for the value of attributes varies within a schema -- if a book has a title which is available in Russian/Cyrillic and Russian/Roman, and my browser can only display roman character sets, while the rest of the information on the book is in English). However, packaging does have some accounting advantages (it's easier to remove a package of metadata when the resource it describes has been removed rather than a slew of individual metadata resources) and packaged metadata may be easier to search by attribute value than individual resource metadata. Packaging also seems to have the drawback of requiring a more complex metadata data model than links and resources due to the complexity of the package data structure. - Jim
Received on Thursday, 13 February 1997 19:55:43 UTC