Comments of the site-meta draft

The TAG asked me to review the site-meta draft: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-site-meta-00
Comments below.

These are my personal comments and have not been reviewed by the TAG. 
So, it is possible that some TAG members may disagree with them and/or 
have additional comments.

Minor Comments

1. I think you realize that the use of site-meta as a suffix to the URI 
steals a portion of the address space available for URIs and may be in 
conflict with existing URIs that use ‘site-meta’ at the end. I presume 
you have come to terms with this as a necessary evil.

2. It takes 2 requests to access a piece of metadata. This, too, I 
presume you have come to terms with.

3. The text says that “Each "meta" element … MUST have a "rel" attribute containing a link relation.”  
However, the third meta child in the example does not have a ‘rel’ attribute.  Is this a typo?

<meta type="text/example">

  foo = bar

  baz = bat

  </meta>

 4. In the above example, I presume “foo = bar   baz = bat” is the content of the metadata.  
Is this meant to be free text or XML?  A few words of explanation and/or a realistic example would be helpful. 

 More Serious Comments

 5. The <metadata> element contains <meta> children that contain information about individual pieces of 
metadata.  But metadata about what?  Is this metadata for the site as a whole or for some URI contained 
on the site?  Specifically, what is the subject of the “rel” attribute?

 6. Since we are suggesting two mechanisms for accessing metadata: Link Header and site-meta, it seems to me 
that we need to say something about the relationship between these mechanisms.  Do we need both?  
What are the usecases?  Can a website support both mechanisms?  I see no reason why it should not.  
If  site-meta is about the site as a whole, how can I get metadata about individual URIs on the site?  
Do I use the link header mechanism for this?  

 

7. If a website supports both the Link Header and the site-meta mechanisms, then the data obtained from 
using these two mechanisms must be consistent.  As it stands, the structure of the <meta> element and a 
Link Header entry are a bit different.  Should these be aligned?

 -- 

All the best, Ashok

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2009 04:00:53 UTC