- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 18:02:56 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org, "Stuart Williams" <skw@hp.com>
I am very pleased to announce the availability of a new editors' draft of a TAG finding: "The use of Metadata in URIs". HTML and XML versions are available at [1,2,3]. This is a significant revision to the previous draft [4]. Note that I recently published a guide to work-to-date on this issue at [5]. and that served as input to this rewrite. Those new to this issue might want to check out the guide. The principle goals of this rewrite include: * The use of more examples and stories to motivate conclusions, as long ago requested by Dan Connolly: "hmm... no story atop 4 July 2003 draft of finding" [6]. In fact, I originally set out to add just a story or two, and came to feel that examples were a good way to make most of the points. So, most of the conclusions and suggestions are introduced in a succession of little Dirk & Nadia-style stories. * A first cut at focussing on the conclusions we tentatively agreed in the TAG teleconference of May 2, 2006 [7]. These roughly correspond to the conclusions proposed at the end of my guide [5,8], but with one very significant addition: * Until May 2nd, the drift of TAG discussions had been very much: "Metadata in URIs, just say no". During the telcon, some TAG members emphasized a second line of thinking, which is basically: "While it is indeed undesirable for software to be reliant on URI metadata, and while it's very important to understand which sorts of metadata can be inferred reliably and which not, having meaningful URIs is very important to human users of the Web. If you read a URI on a billboard or the side of the bus, you want it to be sensible." The TAG asked me to try to make that point strongly too, so this new draft attempts explore both the pro and the con sides of exploiting URI metadata. I don't consider this draft completely polished, but it's easily good enough to signal the directions I'm exploring. I'd rather not do more polishing until I get some encouragement that this is the right base on which to build. So, I welcome comments from the TAG and from readers of www-tag. I think we've tentatively scheduled some time for this issue on this coming Tuesday's call (5/16). Thank you! Thank you. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31 [2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20060511.html [3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20060511.xml [4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20030708.html [5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2006/02/metadatainURI31Roadmap.html [6] http://www.w3.org/2003/07/07-tag-summary.html#metadataInURI-31 [7] http://www.w3.org/2006/05/02-tagmem-minutes.html#item03 [8] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2006/02/metadatainURI31Roadmap.html#NoahIdeas -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Thursday, 11 May 2006 22:03:12 UTC