Re: [syndication] site-wide metadata [was: RFC: myPublicFeeds.opml]

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

Mark,

1. I work at Harvard, not UserLand. And I just work there, I can't make them
do anything in particular.

2. The train left the station on this with robots.txt. The world survived.
Sorry, I noticed. I wasn't supposed to, I guess, but I did.

3. Instead of impeding growth, it would be great if the W3C did things to
foster growth, like declare one top-level name to be reserved, and then
establish a web app to reserve names within that folder. It would take a
weekend to write and deploy. I'll help.

4.Further, only optional functionality should depend on these names, nothing
mission critical (as previous applications have done).

That's about all I want to say on this. I've noticed how much effort one has
to put in to innovate here. This mail list is broken. Sorry, I forgot. ;->

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Nottingham" <mnot@mnot.net>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: [syndication] site-wide metadata [was: RFC: myPublicFeeds.opml]


>
> On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 08:37  AM, Dave Winer wrote:
>
> > BTW, I didn't break any W3C edict by placing a myPublicFeeds.opml at
> > the top
> > level of my site. In fact, TBL went out of his way to say this was my
> > right.
> > And it's Yahoo's right to create a file with the same name in the same
> > location. Again, not something the W3C would want to get in the way of.
>
> Correct. Dave saying "this is how UserLand does this" is fine. Yahoo
> doing the same is likewise fine. Dave has every right to explain this
> behaviour in a specification. The problem comes in when people write
> software that *expects* a particular resource on *other* Web sites to
> behave in the same way, based solely on its name.
>
> Put another way, the problem is with standards (whether a de facto
> standard by a single vendor, or a Recommendation from the W3C, or an
> IETF standard, etc.) specifying URIs for other people. It's true that
> they can choose to follow that standard or not, but software will be
> written assuming that that URI means something whether or not they do.
> This has consequences for both the Web sites that don't support it, and
> the software that's expecting a specific behaviour without any
> agreement that it'll happen.
>
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/
>
>
>
>
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>