- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@ingr.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 10:57:30 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
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