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

"Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
To: Lou Montulli <montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: RFC: Multi-Owner Maintenance robot (MOMspider) 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 07 Dec 1993 10:47:40 CST."
             <9312071647.AA21750@stat1.cc.ukans.edu> 
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 04:43:38 -0800
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
Message-id: <9312080443.aa03028@paris.ics.uci.edu>


I wrote:

>> 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.
>> 

Lou Montulli <montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu> writes:

> <Link Rel="made" href...> does not preclude the use of indirection.

It doesn't preclude anything, nor does it provide the author with any
guidance for consistency (i.e. the field names do not make sense).  Further,
there is a significant semantic difference between the OWNS relationship
(described in Tim's reply) and the MADE relationship.

> 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.  

First of all, comments are not hidden -- they can be seen in the source.
Second, it is important to provide a means of indirection AND stating the
expected use up-front so that future tool-writers can avoid assuming that
it is an e-mail address and, if necessary, take advantage of the alias
feature.  Third, of course it's foolish -- that is the nature of a kludge.

> 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".

It exists as an HTTP header but there is no defined means for providing
that information to the server for HTML files.  Thus, some form of
HTML element is needed.


....Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                   (fielding@ics.uci.edu)