Re: 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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