Re: Revisiting Authoritative Metadata (was: The failure of Appendix C as a transition technique)

Le 25 févr. 2013 à 13:13, Eric J. Bowman a écrit :
> I've used the existence of sender intent for years, as a means of collaboration with other developers.  

The issue is not really about people doing the right thing. We are plenty on this list to care about "Being strict to be cool" [1]. It's absolutely awesome when people do the right thing.


The issue is social and somehow historical. The Web is based on the fact that people can break things. They should not, but they can (URIs, wrong message, etc. etc.) and breaking happens all the time. With my ex-plumber hat when I was working at Opera, aka contacting Web sites for getting them to do the right thing, the issue is… discouraging.


* Some Web developers just don't know
* Some Web developers have conflict with SysOp on what is the  good configuration.
* Some people creating content have no choices on how to serve files (most of the time they don't know what it means)

The issue is then for the thousands, sometimes millions of users who land on a Web site which does the wrong thing. The tool is not the server, the tool is the browser and so the tool is wrong.

An example of a "success story" getting things fixed?
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2011/03/30/improving-interoperability-the-story-of-a-bug
http://my.opera.com/karlcow/blog/2011/03/03/wrong-to-be-right-with-xhtml

The bug was opened for two years before getting it solved. And it is not solved for many servers out there after reaching out many times Microsoft people.

In the mean time **for the users**, Opera had/has to do horrible hacks for coping with wrong server configurations and abusive user agent sniffing.


The HTTP story is good, it is a beautiful story with well crafted messages and knowledgeable people. And we should not stop advocating for this story. At the same time, we have to cope and define an architecture which is more robust in the context of the Web and its social interactions.





[1]: my previous signature in the past

-- 
Karl Dubost
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2013 03:08:05 UTC