You might recall that I was waffling on some time ago about the
desirability of an HTTP "META" method, and in fact a much revised
version of the document on this subject which I posted to the list has
now made it out as an "Internet Draft" - draft-hamilton-indexing-00.txt,
with much help from Dan LaLiberte.
Independently, Marc Solomon at UC San Francisco has put together a very
persuasive document arguing for a META method and showing how one might
be put together...
<URL:http://pele.ckm.ucsf.edu/marc/work/meta/draft-salomon-http-meta-00.
txt>
I think between them, these two documents raise lots of interesting
questions, some of which at least might be appropriate for discussion
on this mailing list. Given the disinterest and occasional downright
hostility which seems to be associated with meta-<anything>, it might
be an idea to get our story straight before taking any of this to a
more public forum :-)
The main question is probably what Marc asked me: having gotten all of
this meta-information in Dublin Core Markup Language, embedded in HTML,
with arbitrary formats linked in, etc etc, how does one get it off the
server on which it lives ?
A lazy conclusion to leap to is that given an HTTP UR[IL], it should be
possible to pass this (somehow) to an HTTP server, with an indication
that you want meta-information rather than just a copy of the object(s)
or associated HTTP headers. [Meta-info might be several orders of
magnitude larger than plain HTTP headers?]
This suggests an additional HTTP header or headers, an additional HTTP
method, or some sort of special convention in the Request URI ?
Next question: should it be possible to request multiple objects'
meta-information in one go ? viz. "get me the meta-info for all of the
objects which are prefixed by /xyz/", or "get me the meta-info for
everything on this server"
Extra bonus questions:
Is retrieving large amounts of meta-info something which should be done
by the same mechanism which is used to retrieve the meta-info for a
single object ? Should we even be trying to do this stuff within HTTP
? Is a search really a request for meta-info constrained according to
some set of search terms ?
OK, that's enough for now!
Martin
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