[uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Dimitri,

> Philosophical ramblings of what's data and what's meta-data aside, the
> reality is that metadata has been living inside of data quite
> comfortably on the Web. I can't understand why you would want to have
> it any other way. Honestly, I am struggling here.

The issue is that there is metadata which conceptually lives  
*alongside* the document:
* how long is it
* when was it last accessed
* when was it last modified
* who most recently viewed

These are the kinds of things that should NOT be inside the document  
--  imagine the loop of trying to continually recalculate a document  
which contains a description of its own length, or keeping track of  
last-modified time that way...

In addition, there are some formats which simply do not allow useful  
metadata to live inside them -- e.g., GIFs, if I recall correctly.

I absolutely agree that much of what is called metadata belongs in  
the document, and should be kept there. But, we do need something for  
the "true" metadata, which really does live alongside (meta) data.

-- Ernie P.

On Apr 14, 2006, at 1:36 PM, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:

> On 4/14/06, Mark Nottingham <mnot at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
>
>>> Putting on a different hat, I'll point out another option ...
>>> put the metadata *in* the data:
>>>
>>>     http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp
>>>
>>> For the descriptive metadata for which this is appropriate,
>>> you don't need a separate URI, the latency of a separate
>>> GET request, etc.
>
> ... and this takes us all the way back to good old plain HTML. Gotta
> love the merry-go-round :)
>
> Philosophical ramblings of what's data and what's meta-data aside, the
> reality is that metadata has been living inside of data quite
> comfortably on the Web. I can't understand why you would want to have
> it any other way. Honestly, I am struggling here.
>
> :DG<
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