Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 15:59:31 -0400
To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
From: mitra@path.net (Mitra)
Subject: Re: Re: Meta info tags
Message-Id: <9409231258.aa00726@pandora.sf.ca.us>
At 12:19 AM 9/23/94 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
>> Back to the original question - I think specifications of a minimum set of
>> attributes belong with particular programs, or in applicability documents.
>> e.g.
>> "When you see a request for the HEAD of a document return a URC with at
>> least the Author, Date and URL fields"
>
>Do you think each individual program gets to decide what the 'Author'
>field means? If you're going to share URCs from one application to the
>next, is there some least-common set that must be present?
No - I think there are three questions here.
1) How does a URC look, how is it formatted, how is meta-information
represented in it. This is what I thought we were doing now, with various
proposals.
2) What are the minimum set of fields that are transferred in each
situation - e.g. what fields MUST be returned in a HTTP-Head retrieval,
what fields must be passed be returned from an Archie search to enable the
result to be passed on to Gopher etc. These should be relatively
uncontroversial applicability documents, iff they are restricted to
specific cases.
3) What is meant by any particular tag, and how is the value formatted,
e.g. "Author" is used for hte author, not "From" and the data is formatted
as in RFC822 with a name and email address. This has the potential to be
a can of worms, as the "non-existant-element-set-WG" found out, but I
think it can be seperated from 1 and 2, and potentially forked between
different subsets working on different parts of it.
- Mitra
=======================================================================
Mitra mitra@path.net
V.P.Engineering, Pandora Systems (415)488-0944