Re: Base

At 01:44 PM 22/01/97 -0700, Dave Hollander wrote:

>Forgive me for diverting the attention of the group. I intended the 
>discussion about base merely as an example of the issues that Elliot 
>has so clearly articulated.

Well sorry, Dave, but I don't think this issue should be un-raised.  I went
to bat for a clearer interpretation of BASE quite some time ago back when
HTML-WG was still kind of useful; the discussion at that point taught me
that there is no consensus as to what the specs mean and how this should
be used; thus in the HTML world, it is de fact broken.

At the time I was a robot writer and my robot was looking for help in
de-duping, i.e. how many slightly-variant mirror copies of the Jargon file
do you really want to index?  But beyond this narrow interest, I then
believed, and still do, strongly, that it would be useful for there
to be a standard way for an object to assert "Here is the canonical
address which I request to be used in retrieving the object you are now 
reading".  Use in hot-lists and by crawlers being just two obvious 
applications.  I think this would be a highly useful, cheap-to-specify, 
easy-to-implement item to put in XML-LINK.

Any reason not to do this? - Tim

Received on Thursday, 23 January 1997 07:47:20 UTC