deepLinking-25

Understanding the decision was to leave the placeholder until 
making a decision, the following:

From the minutes from the 19 August 2002 TAG teleconference:

[Norm]
  I'd be quite happy with Tim's text, actually:
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jul/0118.html

That text opens 

"A Danish court has ruled that deep linking is illegal.  This is obviously 
architecturally profoundly broken..."

The architecture is not broken.  It is working as designed.  The 
law is not broken.  It is a code for constraining a use based 
on that architecture.  These are separate codes (one for the 
architecture, one for the community of Danish publishers) 
under separate governing bodies.   The Danish user can 
break Danish law without in any way improperly using the 
Web architecture.

While we may all be concerned 
that the law is confusing a behavior with an aspect of the 
architecture, and may object to such laws in principle, that 
principle is not architectural.  As such, the W3C Web Architecture 
document is not the place to address this by stating that such a 
law is "bad policy".  The W3C can't make that stick.  It should clearly 
plainly and irrefutably express architectural principles.  This 
as Tim Bray likes to say, comes under "dare to do less" and even 
moreso, do only what is doable.  This next statement goes even 
further afield:

"The architecture of the World Wide Web does not support the notion of a
  "home page" or a "gateway page", and any effort in law to pretend
  otherwise is therefore bad policy. "

That is a judgement call not only outside the provenance of the architecture 
document, possibly beyond the expertise of the tag.  Law has many 
convenient fictions for example, "the people, the state" and so on. 
The web has convenient fictions, among them, homepages named index.htm. 

About the most one can say in an "architecture document" is:

  The architecture of the World Wide Web does not support the notion of a
  "home page" or a "gateway page".  The publication of a Uniform
  Resource Identifier is, in the architecture of the Web, a statement
  that a resource is available for retrieval.  The technical protocols
  which are used for Web interaction provide a variety of means for site
  operators to control access, including password protection and the
  requirement that users take a particular route to a page."

then let the local community work out what is "appropriate".  A 
separate effort should be undertaken to correct any misunderstanding 
of some legislative group that a law forbidding deep linking can 
be enforced architecturally but explain that it can be done by proper application 
of the features of the architecture.  At that point, cite the paragraph 
as shown above.  

It is wise to inform the law; it is foolish to attempt to make it. 
That is not the job of the W3C, the TAG, or its members.

len

Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 11:58:03 UTC