Re: ACTION-308 (part 2) Updates to 'The Self-Describing Web'

On Jan 6, 2010, at 4:52 PM, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:

[...]

> Furthermore, the draft text really doesn't explain how allowance for 
> sniffing would change the rest of the SDW story.

And that was deliberate. I am not "allowing sniffing" so much as saying, "if you are going to sniff then do it this way". I didn't intend to change the meaning of the SDW story at all, or its relationship to the use of authoritative metadata.

>  After all, we give 
> examples in which providers of data are held legally accountable for 
> having published certain content, precisely because the chain of normative 
> specifications makes clear their correct interpretation.  In a world where 
> people start to "sniff", am I accountable for the (mis) interpretation of 
> something served as text/plain that just happens to resemble some other 
> media type?  The whole point of SDW is to tell stories like that.
> 
> So, I agree with Larry that we should steer clear of elevating sniffing to 
> being even a good practice at the architecture level (it's not a 
> "principle" in the sense of AWWW principles in any case);  even if we do 
> want to acknowledge that widespread use of sniffing in practice in a 
> revised SDW, I think it behooves us to carefully explain how the core 
> stories about accountability and lack of ambiguity are affected.

I agree that it would be good to explain the ambiguity introduced by sniffing.

>  I think 
> we have two choices:  1) leave SDW alone -- it tells a quite coherent 
> story at the architecture level, and we can view instances of sniffing as 
> deviations from the architecture
> or 2) do a very careful job of explaining 
> just what does and doesn't change in the SDW story given that sniffing 
> happens.

I have roughly attempted your choice 1) with the understanding that this was the will of the group. As you note though, we could do a much more careful job of explaining what changes given that sniffing happens.

Regards,

- johnk

> 
> Noah
> 
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> Noah Mendelsohn 
> IBM Corporation
> One Rogers Street
> Cambridge, MA 02142
> 1-617-693-4036
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Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 15:16:19 UTC