> Now of course this means that the WWW browser needs to understand
> multipart MIME stuff but that shouldn't be too tricky to do.
Anything involving getting 30 or 100 software vendors to change their
products needs a far stronger business case than the metadata group
can ever provide. `your users will benefit when they use your product
to search the web, if everyone else implements this, people use it, and
the webcrawlers index it, and ...' Forget it.
Note that Netscape Navigator already understands multipart MIME messages,
but with a compltely different semantics -- this is how `server push'
animations are done. You won't get that to change easily, since it's
*extremely* widely deployed.
I know I keep saying this, but I'm not vey interested in a metadata standard
for the year 2010. Nor even in one for the year 1998. And if you require
coordinated multi-vendor software changes, you'll be lucky to get it by then.
The MIME stuff has a certain elegance. But anything that alters existing
non-DublinCore metada (e.g. by wrapping it), or that alters the way an
HTML file is deliverd, is doomed to failure. Two years of hard experience
on the various IETF mailing lists and meetings has demonstrated this clearly.
Lee
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