You just knew it would be RDF

Roy M. Silvernail <roy-IID2DOfhWowpa0TFVrFX/[email protected]> wrote:
>And folks, I think we've struck oil!  One <link> header, where available,
>pointing to an RDF file that hosts the full set of metadata about the site in
>question.  Back that up with a comment pointer in robots.txt for the sites
>where the admins work in restraints.

Go back about 48 hours and I remember thinking, "This is going to end up 
being RDF". Immediately followed by "some sections of the community 
won't like that". ;-)

Looking at Bill's example reminds me that I really want exactly 3 and no 
more than 3 bits of information about the files pointed to by this 
metadata file.
- href location
- plain text title
- type

We can already say the following in formats that are already well 
understood:-
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://foo.com/bar.rdf" dc:title="The Foo 
RSS 2.0 feed" />

and in html

<link rel="alternate" type="something" href="http://foo.com/bar.rdf" 
title="The Foo RSS 2.0 feed" />

So there's really only one thing missing and that's a formal agreed list 
of types. To be used like this.
<rdfs:seeAlso ... ns:type="rss20" ... />
<link ... type="http://bar.com/metatype#rss20" ... />

Now if there's a type of http://bar.com/metatype#list (or something) 
that refers to one of these lists as well, we can construct arbitrarily 
complex networks of these files. And we would only need a single <link> 
entry that could happily go in every web page on a site.

So how do we get this file type namespace built?

I want to ask one last thing that may wind up the RDF people. Even 
though we're using RDF, can we please structure these list files so that 
they're readable by plain old XML parsers. If you want to add arbitrary 
RDF structures, please do it on the end of the file so that the core 
information is still in the XML form. This may seem an unnecessary 
restriction ("just use an RDF parser, duh!", "It's all just triples, 
triples all the way") but we also want this standard to have the widest 
possible implementation.

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond-/Fkc1E/MbsFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
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