Re: Comments on /site-meta

On 16/10/2008, at 10:11 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>> 1) If the site has a normal representation there (i.e., a home  
>> page), it
>> could be big, which would be an impediment to clients getting the  
>> metadata
>> quickly
>
> Fair point.
>
>> (or at all, in the case of resource-constrained use cases).
>
> I don't get that - do you have an example of such a use case?

E.g., a mobile device / printer / remote sensor / etc. might have to  
download an entire HTML homepage to get the metadata it needs. True,  
it could drop the connection, but that's nasty and there'd still be  
packets in flight.


>> Remember, conneg can't be used to get something fundamentally  
>> different; it
>> needs to be a representation of the *same* resource.
>
> Yep, but I don't think that's particularly relevant - usual conneg
> rules apply, but representations of the root namespace resource MAY
> contain a link to the metadata doc.

Of course. I just think it's stretching it a bit to say that a 10K  
HTML file and three lines of RDF (for example) are representations of  
the same resource...


>> 2) The step of indirection is a deal-killer for some users.
>
> For example..?

It's the extra round-trip time; subjecting all of your users to that  
is a big deal to performance-minded people, especially when you're  
considering things like users on high-latency, low-bandwidth, high- 
loss links, running very popular sites and the bandwidth associated  
with doing that, etc. This topic occupied a *lot* of time in the P3P  
discussions, and it still comes up with a lot of users considering  
this issue today.


>> Given that the whole idea here is to make this a slam-dunk solution
>> for the problem (so as to avoid creating any *other* new well-known
>> locations), it has to have as few points of friction as possible.
>
> Do you happen to know if robot.txt has any extension points (or could
> be viably revised)? (Got a presentation to prep last minute or I'd go
> look :-)

I looked at that, but the situation is really muddy; AIUI some parsers  
will choke on unrecognised content. I actually started out assuming  
robots.txt, but seeing as there isn't even a decent spec for it...


>> What' I'm *really* wondering at this point is if XML itself is too  
>> complex
>> -- i.e., should this be a line-oriented format? One pre-draft  
>> reviewer
>> already suggested as much.
>
> That sounds reasonable, though it would be good if an agent could make
> some sense of the doc without prior knowledge - which is a point, the
> current proposed format doesn't have an XML namespace, which pre-empts
> any chance of follow-your-nose discovery (a la GRDDL).

Yeah, I'm trying to see how far I can get in 2008 without a namespace :)

Question out of the blue -- can GRDDL do dispatch on a media type? If  
not, why not?

Cheers and thanks,


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Thursday, 16 October 2008 11:27:27 UTC