- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 18:43:41 -0800
- To: www-talk@w3.org
Mechanisms for discovering "site metadata" (statements about grouped resources) like '/robots.txt' and '/w3c/p3p.xml' are considered bad because they impose an external convention on someone's URI namespace. I'm wondering if there have been any proposals for a mechanism that is based on HTTP and URIs to solve this problem, and if so, why they weren't adopted. The obvious solution would be to use OPTIONS * along with an appropriate accept header (or maybe something like AcceptNS?). Are there any problems with this sort of approach? The only thing that I can see is that OPTIONS isn't cacheable, but that doesn't completely kill it as an, er, option. It seems that if there ever were a time to recommend a solution to this, it would be now; P3P is winding its way to Recommendation, and IIRC there have been some Web Services-related discovery protocols that use a well-known location as well. -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2001 21:43:42 UTC