What
· Technology
· · Web
· · · TAG
</TAG> · Today I resigned from the W3C TAG; the W3C Process Document is 100% crystal clear that a single company can’t have two representatives, and Norm Walsh is ably representing Sun. I’m sad, but not too sad. Sad because this is a great bunch of people and it’s been a blast working with them. On the other hand, we got a lot of work done, including taking our major deliverable to Last Call. Also, the TAG is pretty time-consuming, and I think the new job is going to consume more or less 100% of my time. Thanks for the good times, guys!
West England Web Architecture · I’m writing this from the West of England: Bristol, to be precise, where I’m attending a face-to-face meeting of the W3C TAG. Herewith a few illustrated notes on the place, the country, Canadian History, and the dreaded Semantic Web Insurrectionists ...
On Resources · This is not really for general consumption (although all are welcome); it is a contribution to a massive, lengthy debate that has been swirling for a long time on the W3C TAG public forum as well as the more IETF-centric URI talk shop. It’s just that ongoing not only gives me a nicer writing environment, but gives the rest of the world a better reading environment, than email. Particularly if you use a better browser (if you’re reading this in IE, try ongoing in some other browser flavor just as an experiment). Anyhow, it gets real technical and pretty abstruse starting right here ...
High Throughput · In co-operation with Dave Orchard of BEA, I’ve spent the last few days hosting a face-to-face meeting of the W3C Technical Architecture Group here in Vancouver. I’m pretty tired, since there’s been some heavy lifting, with a background roar of allegorical artillery. But there are compensations ...
Web Architecture, 2003/06/27 · The fruits of quite a bit of TAG labour over the last few months is now available for your bedtime-reading pleasure. I’m referring to the latest draft of the Architecture of the World Wide Web which, when it’s complete, will allegedly serve as the impartial arbiter for many thorny disputes and give guidelines to the mad scientists who are thinking up next year’s Cool New Web Stuff. Herewith a quickie overview guide as to what’s cooked and what’s not ...
Grinding Away on Webarch · I'm currently grinding away on a rework of Chapter Four of the Architecture of the World Wide Web spec that we in the TAG are supposed to be delivering as one of our prime raisons-d’etre. I think this has the potential to become a really useful document; I offer some reasons for that opinion, and a progress report on Chapter Four, with squeals of glee ...
RFC2396bis, Light Bedtime Reading · One of the many items causing the W3C TAG’s input queue to bulge alarmingly is the redrafting of RFC2396, currently in the hands of Roy Fielding, to whom we all owe thanks. This is the document that defines what a URI is, officially, for the programmers who build the Web. A URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier (see Universal Republic of Love). It’s one of the three legs of the Web’s architectural tripod, and is very important. You might want to review it in detail, like I am right now, but some advance warnings are in order ...
Addressing For the Other Billions · Much time on the W3C TAG telecon today on (I think) an important issue: how to extend the machinery of the Universal Republic of Love, er I mean URL, er I mean URI, to the billions who don't use our ninety-seven ASCII characters to describe the world. This is tricky, not so much because it's tricky, but because there's so much Anglocentric software out there that we have to cater to. (Warning: severely geeky.) ...
In the Web-Architecture Trenches · NDAs prevent me from talking very much about my favorite project at work, which is a pity because it's real interesting: The world contains several repositories of electronic information whose size and value are comparable to the Web's, but which are generally not usefully available for search and browsing, but could be. We're working on it. My TAG cycles the last couple evenings have gone into the work-in-progress on redrafting RFC 2396, which specifies what a URI (no, not URL) is ...
There's No Such Thing as a Web Site · The technology that makes the Web go doesn't have any built-in notion of a "site" or a "home page", even though that's how people think about things. This causes all sorts of practical problems; the well-known
/robots.txt mechanism for crawler control is kind of a kludge, and works really badly when multiple sites are on the same server, for example members.aol.com. Another symptom is the fact that it's kind of hard to find the RSS feed for a web site. Well, we may be starting to address this issue over in the TAG ...Writing Specs · In connection with my W3C TAG work, in recent weeks I've published drafts or updates of three separate pieces of standards-ware. Writing these things is challenging in a way that nothing else is ...
The TAG at Work · All day in a TAG Face-to-face meeting at UC Irvine, a lovely spot in lovely weather. Real grinding in the nasty architectural underbrush this time ...
