/site-meta
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Metadata discovery is a nagging problem that’s been hanging around the Web for a while. There have been a few stabs at this problem (including at least one by yours truly), but no real progress.
This is both unfortunate and worrisome, because as the next generation of Web-based protocols informed by REST, Web 2.0 and the like roll out, they’re going to need a way to find and talk about metadata on the Web in an automated fashion.
And no, this isn’t a Semantic Web pitch. Sorry.
The immediate need is for XRDS-Simple; Eran wanted a way to find security metadata for a site, and in discussion we agreed that rather than re-inventing the heel for the nth time, we’d try to do it right, hopefully for the last time.
And so /site-meta was born; an ultra-simple, lightweight and minimally intrusive way to find a Web site’s metadata. E.g.,
<metadata>
<meta href="/robots.txt" rel="robots"/>
<meta rel="privacy" type="application/p3p.xml" href="/w3c/p3p.xml"/>
<meta type="application/example+xml" rel="http://example.com/rel"
href="http://other.example.net/example">
<example-root xmlns="http://www.example.com">
<!-- some metadata here -->
</example-root>
</meta>
<meta type="text/example">
foo = bar
baz = bat
</meta>
</metadata>
Please have a read, note the FAQ at the end and send feedback to the www-talk list. I’m particularly interested in whether people think XML is the best choice here.