Re: RFC: Multi-Owner Maintenance robot (MOMspider)

montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu (Lou Montulli)
From: montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu (Lou Montulli)
Message-id: <9312071647.AA21750@stat1.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: RFC: Multi-Owner Maintenance robot (MOMspider)
To: fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu (Roy T. Fielding)
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 93 10:47:40 CST
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9312070711.aa04183@paris.ics.uci.edu>; from "Roy T. Fielding" at Dec 7, 93 7:10 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL2]

> 
> >> <!ELEMENT HEAD - -  ( TITLE?  & ISINDEX?  & NEXTID?  & LINK* 
> >>                              & BASE?     & OWNER?   & EXPIRES? )>
> >> <!ELEMENT OWNER - -  CDATA    -- Alias name for document owner -->
> >> <!ELEMENT EXPIRES - -  CDATA  -- Expiration date in RFC850 format -->
> > 
> > Your suggestion for a multi-owner maintenance robot (MOMspider) seems
> > a good one, and I like the idea for making the owner and expiry date
> > part of the document HEAD. I never did like the <LINK REL="MADE" HREF=...">
> > notation. Perhaps we ought to stipulate the OWNER should be an email address?
> 
> I believe that owner/author privacy will become an important issue 
> as large-scale information resources are added to the Web.  Therefore,
> I prefer to use a level of indirection such that the owner's alias name
> can be used (by MOMspider or other scripts) to look-up the real owner's
> e-mail address(es) and perform actions tailored to that owner.  For instance,
> a {htbin-post | cgi-bin}/mail_owner script could be written which examines
> a table of author aliases at that site and determines both whether or not the
> owner wants to receive e-mail and what the true e-mail address is.
> 
<Link Rel="made" href...> does not preclude the use of indirection.

There are many other uses for the owners address than just MOMspider
so hideing the owners address inside a comment when a defined structure
for that information already exists is foolish.  

Also, the EXPIRES information you are looking for already has a 
predefined method definition.  The information is passed back as
an HTTP header that looks like "Expires: DATE".

:lou