"Homework" (was: [Minutes] 7 Jan 2002 TAG teleconference)

At 06:18 PM 1/8/02 -0500, Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
>The Chair observed that several TAG participants considered Roy
>Fielding's dissertation to be good material on Web Protocols,
>and invited the remaining participants to review chapters 4
>and 5 and indicate whether they should form a basis for a written
>Web architecture.

I've taken a look at those chapters, and would like to offer some 
observations...

It strikes me that the primary focus of this material is on protocol 
interactions, with only passing reference to information representation 
issues.  I think both of these issues (should) have comparable weight in an 
articulation of Web architecture.  Much of W3C's current work is focused on 
information representations in XML (and RDF).

Section 5.2.1 (of Roy's thesis) starts to address the significance of 
representations (emphasizing the importance of "move the data", rather than 
taking the processing description to the data).  But having acknowledged 
the importance, the focus remains on protocol interactions, with little 
development of architectural principles for the content itself.  What 
discussion therte is seems to focus on HTTP/MIME-like protocol elements, as 
in "metadata is in the form of name-value pairs", something that XML/RDF 
are allowing us to develop beyond - especially as ideas filter back to the 
IETF protocol community.

This is not a criticism of Roy's thesis [chaps 4,5] per se, but a 
suggestion that they're only part of what should be addressed by "web 
architecture".

(I suggest that information representation issues must include some account 
of transformations that can be said to preserve the intended content in 
some way, such as rendering of HTML, or entailment in RDF.)

..

Concerning the discussion of "connector types" in section 5.2.2 - the 
terminology here seems slightly counter to what is being described.  I 
think the discussion is about interface abstractions, but that's not always 
clear in the text.  The distinction between connectors and components seems 
a bit fuzzy to me.

..

#g

Received on Wednesday, 9 January 2002 05:00:49 UTC