Re: Comments on "The use of Metadata in URIs"

On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 11:51  AM, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com 
wrote:

> FWIW, I like the Metadata draft very, very much.  I think it's on the
> short list of the most compelling and useful work that's come out of 
> the
> Tag.

+1


>> * I agree with the sentiment in the second editorial note; sections 
>> two
>> and three, while containing interesting information, don't justify
>> their length. I would advocate a severe editing down.
>
> FWIW, I respectfully disagree with my esteemd colleague Mr. 
> Nottingham.  I
> found the sections following the EdNote to be extremely valuable.  I 
> thing
> they will alert less experienced readers to a number of subtleties that
> would otherwise be clear only to experts.  Were this a Recommendation I
> might argue as Mark does for sticking to a terse, normative core;  
> given
> that this is a Tag finding, I think the purpose should be to educate 
> and
> clarify.  I like it better in long form.

Fair enough; I too found them valuable and interesting, but I think 
they'd scare away a casual reader, which to me is one of the important 
audiences for this kind of document.

I'd reiterate that it might help make the document more digestible by 
clearly identifying and targeting its audiences. I can think of three;
   * authors of specifications that use URIs
   * people and software that use URIs
   * people and software that create URIs

Has there been any discussion on what audience TAG findings should be 
written for? It could be that the TAG decides its findings are 
primarily for use by the first audience, relying on external articles 
and other publications to make the content more palatable to broader 
audiences (in which case the current form works well).

Cheers,

Received on Wednesday, 13 August 2003 15:20:52 UTC