- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:05:55 -0500
- To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@yahoo-inc.com>
- Cc: "Stuart Williams" <skw@hp.com>, www-tag@w3.org
Mark: looks like we mostly agree. Regarding your last point, which is basically that users get value from finding metadata in URIs, there's some recent news that may be of interest. On our call last week the same point was made by T.V. Raman and others. As a result, we've decided to explore a significant change of direction in the finding. Whereas in 2002 (before my time) the TAG decided [1]: "Resolved: Accept issue matadataInURI-NNN with note that TAG thinks the answer is "no" and will explain what to do instead. " last week we decided to have a more balanced presentation of the upsides and downsides of relying on inferred metadata. In particular, we all regularly manipulate URIs based on guesses involving metadata. For example, after somehow discovering a link to: http://example.org/book/chapter2 many of us will quite reasonably experiment with trying to find chapter 3 at: http://example.org/book/chapter3 even if we haven't checked what the publishers actual URI assignment policy is. If the document retrieved by that URI looks right, we may trust it. Of course, you wouldn't use such a guess when requiring information that's 100% reliable, but in many cases it's a good an useful thing to do. It's an important aspect of what people expect of the Web. So, I've been asked to redraft the finding in a way that covers both sides of the equation. See the as yet unapproved minutes of our discussion at [2]. I think this means we're heading in the direction suggested by your note. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/2002/12/02-tag-summary.html#metadata-uri [2] http://www.w3.org/2006/03/21-tagmem-minutes.html -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2006 15:06:18 UTC