Review of Rembrance-Day webarch draft

I've sorted these into P1, P2, and P3.  P3 is strictly editorial/typos

<P1>

Is IJ as "Editor" on the front page, the TAG membership at the end 
under "Acknowledgements" the right way to do this?  I'd like to 
acknowledge the members of www-tag and the IETF folks.

Status of: Patent statement should clarify that at the moment there are 
no damn patent disclosures material to Web Architecture and a good 
thing too.

Can we *please* not both quote and monospace URIs? I could live with 
either.

1.2.1, last para and principle.  Either provide a specific example or 
(better just lose them).

2.1 URI Comparisons

"Thus, URIs that are not identical (character for character) 
necessarily refer to different resources."  Wrong.  s/necessarily/may/

2.2 URI Ambiguity: do we really need the para beginning "Ambiguity is 
an error and should not be confused with..."?  I think it opens a can 
of worms that really needs to be addressed systematically with 
reference to RDF.

3. Interaction.  Lose first paragraph, it's fluff.

3.1 Using URIs (note that we ref sect 1.2.2 of [URI], do we have a 
lock-in to a moving target here?

3.1 Editor's note can be removed, I don't think we need text from Chris 
here.

3.2 I don't believe that a message is an event.  It's a bag of bytes.

3.2 Messages and Representations: s/is not a representation/need not be 
a representation/

3.3 Internet Media Type: Sentence beginning  "If this user agent 
implements..." lose it, it's fluff.

3.6 Representation Management: anyone think this could go back into 
section 2?  I don't but you could argue this either way.

3.7 Future Directions: lose the section, it's fluff.

4.3 Extensibility

on "Must-understand", is "stops processing" the only response to an 
error, shouldn't there be some reporting too?

4.4 Separation... the laundry-list of kinds of devices could be 
shortened and really should include a word about "devices in classes 
which haven't been invented yet."

4.4 Separation.  I'm not comfortable with the use of term "logic" here. 
  I'm not sure what it means and I'm not sure I agree with what I think 
it might mean.  Do we mean "flow of control (control for short)"

4.5 Links.  Along with <a name="foo" and <a href="#foo" should we give 
<a href="http://example.com/">?

The <ol> description of URI references is poor.  Let's try "Links are 
commonly expressed using URI References [defined in XX] which may be 
combined with a base URI to yield a usable URI.  For example...

The paragraphs beginning "Web agents resolve..." and "Section 5 of 
[URI]" should be flipped, they're in the wrong order.

4.5 The notion of "active" and "passive" is nowhere defined and is not 
self-evident and should thus not be used.  Just give examples of 
different behaviors, (a) browser sees <a href= (b) browser sees <img 
src= (c) robot sees <a href= (d) reasoning system see <rdf:about href= 
... i.e. we don't need a taxonomy of types of link in here

4.6.3 XML Namespaces.  Lose the sentence "In that respect they are a 
somewhat special case"  It's nonsensical, we're just talking about 
elements and attributes and noting that naming/scoping is different.

s/no "best" data format/no established best-practice data format/

4.6.6 Fragment Identifiers, is it OK (in the <ol> 3rd point) to drag in 
the PSVI?

4.7 Lose this section.

</P1>

<P2>

List of Principles: It would be a nice-to-have if we could put have all 
these phrases in the same part-of-speech, as it is now some of them are 
imperatives "Do this" and others aren't.

1. Introduction: s/the things of interest/items of interest/

s/collectively//

s/URIs/Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)/ [this is the first 
appearance]

1.1.2 "This document focuses as generally as possible on the..."

1.2.3 s/show the importance/show the utility/

The sentence beginning "And quality assurance...", lose it

s/BUt the technology/But the messages that are interchanged/

2. Identification s/communicate about something/communicate must/

Insert a paragraph break before the sentence beginning "Remember that 
the...", then lose those three words so that the para starts "The scope 
of a URI..."

2.2 URI Ambiguity s/natural-language/English/

And why did we lost the pointer to Gutenberg?

2.3 See Editor's note: do we really believe new media types are really 
cheaper than new URI schemes?

2.5 Fragment Identifiers: s/handy/available/

3.1 Using a URI: is the term "origin server" defined?  I don't know it.

s/defined in multiple/described in multiple/

3.3 Internet Media Types: s/governs/specifies/
s/determines/lists/

3.6.1 Representation Availability: s/frustration/experience/

4.3 Extensibility s/(thus keeping down the cost of change)// [fluff]

2nd item in bullet list needs an example.

Sentence beginning "Agent behavior in the face of..." end the sentence 
after "security issues".

The para beginning "Additional strategies include" - all the strategies 
need to go into the continuous tense, i.e. prompting, retrieving, 
falling back etc

4.6.4 Namespace Versioning: s/reuse a namespace name/avoid changing the 
namespace name/

4.6.5 Namespace Documents

Story: why not be specific, give a namespace name in http://example.com?

Story: s/use data optimized for agents automatically/machine-readable 
data/

</P2>

<P3>

In general, look at all trailing "etc." and where possible remove.  
Similarly, try to weed out leading "e.g.", nothing wrong with "For 
example".

Abstract: s/an network-spanning/a network-spanning/

s/e.g., browsers/for example browsers/

s/architecture encompasses/architecture includes/

s/agents within/agents in/

s/three dimensions/three bases/

List of Principles: s/identifier consistency:/identifier consistency/

1.2.2 Error Handling s/observation about/observations about/

2nd bullet: s/a processor/software/  or "code"

1.2.3  "The Web follows Internet tradition in that its interfaces are 
defined..."

s/syntax, by specifying/syntax, specifying/

2.1 s/defined section 2/defined in section 2/

2.3 URI Schemes s/is a URI scheme name/names a URI scheme/

2.4 URI Opacity: s/the PNG/PNG/

"The mailto URI scheme" shouldn't we distinguish "mailto" 
typographically?

3.2 Messages and Representations: s/may carry/may include/

3.3.2 Fragment Identifiers and...: s/representation 
data/representations/

3.4 Authoritative... "privileges to such a representation/privileges to 
such representations/

3.5 Safe: s/e.g. a read-only/typically a/

3.6.3 s/book marking/bookmarking/

4. Data Formats

s/accessibility, internationalization, etc./accessibility and 
internationalization/

4.2 Binary and Textual

s/maintaining processing software/maintaining software/

4.3 Extensibility s/SOAP extensibility/the SOAP extensibility/

s/distributed system of the Web/scale of the Web/

4.6.6 Fragment Identifiers  s/Unfortunately, there are/There are/

<ol> 3rd item about infoset, s/successfully/usefully/

4.6.7 last good practice: s/headers/headers,/

</P3>


Cheers, Tim Bray  http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/

Received on Friday, 14 November 2003 17:41:26 UTC