[uf-rest] Roy Fielding on WebDAV and PROPs

[Mark Nottingham]

There are also cases where;

-- you need to know the metadata before you access the data (e.g.,  
spidering policy, privacy policy, access control policy)
-- for performance reasons, digging through content is impractical  
(e.g., in intermediaries)
-- for administrative manageability and efficiency on both ends, it's  
more practical to work with metadata for more than one resource at a  
time

That doesn't mean that in-document metadata isn't the bees knees,  
just that it isn't a complete solution.


On 2006/04/14, at 1:41 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> 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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>
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>

--
Mark Nottingham
mnot at yahoo-inc.com