With the sincerest respect, Tom, your attitude here is part of the
problem. Maybe, along with many other people, I am indeed still stuck
in the mid-1990s. You have permission to be as condescending as you
like. But still, here I am, stuck. Thoroughly stuck. So no amount of
condescending "sooo-20th-century, my dear" chatter is going to
actually enable me to get to a place where I can do what you think I
should be doing. I cannot use a rewrite rule to catch incoming
requests, or do whatever you are talking about here. I live in an
environment where I simply do not have access at all to the workings
of my server at a level that close to the metal, because it is already
woven into a clever maze of PHP machinery which is too fragile to
allow erks like me to mess with it. Some of the best W3C techies have
taken a look, and they can't find a way through it, either. Maybe Im
in a special position, but I bet a whole lot of people, especially in
the corporate world, are in a similar bind. System level access to a
server is quite a different beast than being allowed to publish HTML
on a website somewhere. I can, and do, publish HTML, or indeed just
about any file I like, but I don't get to insert code. So 6 lines or
600, it makes no difference.
But in any case, this is ridiculous. RDF is just XML text, for
goodness sake. I need to insert lines of code into a server file,
and write PHP scripts, in order to publish some RDF or HTML? That is
insane. It would have been insane in the mid-1990s and its even more
insane now. IMO, it is you (and Tim and the rest of the W3C) who are
stuck in the past here. Most Web users do not, and will not, write
code. They will be publishing content in a cloud somewhere, even
further away from the gritty world of scripts and lines of code than
people - most people - are now. Most actual content providers are
never going to want to even know that PHP scripts exist, let alone be
obliged to write or copy one. Martin is exactly right: this is a MAJOR
bottleneck to SWeb adoption. Its up to the people in the TAG to listen
to this fact and do something about it, not to keep issuing useless
'best practice' advice that cannot be followed by 99% of the world.
RDF should be text, in documents. One should be able to use it without
knowing about anything more than the RDF spec and the XML spec. If it
requires people to tinker with files with names starting with a dot,
or write code, or deploy scripts, then the entire SWeb architecture is
fundamentally broken.
Pat Hayes
On Jun 25, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Tom Heath wrote:
Hi Martin, all,
2009/6/25 Martin Hepp (UniBW) <martin.h...@ebusiness-unibw.org>:
Hi all:
After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata
for their
businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1],
I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of using
.htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic Web
technology.
Are you referring to the best practices at [1]? Unfortunately the
recipes in that document that use .htaccess and mod_rewrite for conneg
no longer count as best practices, precisely due to mod_rewrite and
.htaccess not being adequate for the conneg/303-redirects pattern.
This has been a known issue since WWW2007 at least, and documented at
[2] in July 2007. As far as I know, that recipes document hasn't yet
been updated/deprecated :( (please someone correct me if I'm wrong).
The easiest pattern I've found is to use a RewriteRule to catch all
incoming requests and pass them through a small PHP script that
examines the Accept header and sends back 303s (or 200s) as
appropriate. The code is about 6 lines; I'll publish it somewhere if I
didn't already.
Admittedly, this doesn't solve the problem of access to .htaccess
files. This bottleneck sounds to me like someone circa mid-1990s
saying "my sysadmins won't let me have access to space on the web
server". I guess we need to use lessons learned from that era to
address the problems of this one. Anyway fancy doing a Linked Data for
Sysadmins tutorial at a sysadmin conference?
Cheers,
Tom.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2007Jul/0001.html
------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973
40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office
Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax
FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
