site-wide metadata [was: RFC: myPublicFeeds.opml]

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

I agree that doing this is A Bad Thing; it tells people how to 
structure their URIs (bad), it is inflexible (bad) and is discouraged 
by the folks who are charged with keeping the Web going. Experience 
with favicon.ico and other formats show that this approach brings a lot 
of different folks a lot of headaches.

It's also a really hard problem to solve, so much so that the W3C has 
itself Recommended a 'well-known location' URI for P3P [1]. That being 
the case, I don't see how anyone can expect Dave to change his design 
to be correct, when correct isn't well-defined.

BTW, I think there are reasonable ways to solve this correctly [2], but 
to my knowledge, no widely-deployed Web server has this kind of 
flexibility. I'd like to change that.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#Well_Known_Location
2. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2001NovDec/0099.html


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/