Re: Where does the EARL go?

> > b. each page on the site has a link to the .earl file. it acts like
> > an external css or script file that all pages on a site can point
> > to.  then, the claim is only has to be updated once to effect
> > the whole site.
>
> Well, it's a neat scenario, but remember that an EARL file is
independent
> of the files which point to it. It's not as if you have an association
from
> a file to a piece of EARL saying "this is the conformance claim for
this
> file", because the EARL itself contains that information. You can say,
> "here is some EARL that is related to this page, but don't take our
word
> for it: parse it". EARL can't exist without a TestSubject part, because
it
> simply wouldn't work.

How does that work with a web site, a unique earl report for each url on
the site, how does that work with urls with query portions?  How can EARL
exist unless this has already been decided, how EARL is used is much more
important than what the tags look like.  I'm astonished by this thread.

> > [...] there is no "type/earl" - should there be?
>
> For now, all EARL is going to be served as text/plain or text/xml, so
just
> leave the "type" attribute off. It's only advisory.

Why is EARL served as text/plain - why do you feel it should not have a
mime-type, what purpose does that serve, you say yourself that EARL
contains the information about the url it refers to, this would mean that
an agent could be guided towards just the EARL reports, and never need to
see the url itself unless it was accessible to the group that it was
interested in, this would be harder though if it was text/plain - how do
I configure my UA to cope with earl reports if it's served as text/plain
? it needs it's own mime-type.

> > HTML 4.01 says that new types may be created using the
> > profile attribute on the head element. [4]
>
> People tend to ignore that, sadly.

If it's as little thought out as EARL seems to be, I'm not surprised.

Jim.

Received on Friday, 19 October 2001 14:15:11 UTC