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

"Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
To: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: RFC: Multi-Owner Maintenance robot (MOMspider) 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 07 Dec 1993 17:53:39 GMT."
             <9312071753.AA13742@manuel.hpl.hp.com> 
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 05:21:37 -0800
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
Message-id: <9312080521.aa04544@paris.ics.uci.edu>

Dave Raggett writes:

> I see the elements in the document head being used by the HTTP server
> to generate HTTP headers. This way you can have a general purpose interface
> for agents like MOMspider which also works for non-HTML formats like GIF
> or plain text.
> 
> How about the following for the HTML+ document HEAD:
> 
>     <!-- this element may often be implied by HTTP header info -->
>     <!ELEMENT DATE - O EMPTY>
>     <!ATTLIST DATE
>         created     CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- RFC 850 Date format --
>         expires     CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- RFC 850 Date format -->
> 
>     <!ELEMENT OWNER - O EMPTY>
>     <!ATTLIST OWNER
>         owner       CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- name of owner --
>         contact     CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- email address as URL -->
> 
> These two elements wouldn't cause any problems for existing browsers.
> The OWNER element can have either the owner or contact attributes or both.
> Sometimes it might be nice to specify the owner by a hypertext link to a
> page giving an autobiography, affiliation, contact details etc. The owner
> attribute is as you suggest and can be used as an indirection to look up
> the real owner's e-mail address by programs privy to that information.
> An alternative to OWNER is two new relationship types for LINK. The OWNER
> element seems marginally cleaner.

That is an excellent solution.  However, I have a couple nits to pick.

I would prefer:

      <!ATTLIST OWNER
          name        CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- name (or alias) of owner  --
          email       CDATA   #IMPLIED  -- email address of owner    --
          href        %URL;   #IMPLIED  -- URL for biographical info -->

as it more directly reflects what you describe.  Obviously, it would be
easy for a server to translate this into 

      <LINK rev="OWNS" title="name (email)" href="href">

and thus follow Tim's suggestion as well.


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