In the last month so much written ideas and talks about Content Negotation and URI, information spaces and so on dilemmas, in the Semantic Web areas…
And what about the abstractions which are on the Web.?..

So, during the first setting of Fullout site ( as soon as possible the first coherent version online, also in english ), i’ll take the chance of studying better htaccess, content negotiation issue and the language dilemma of web pages…

With the large amount of editors, of programs which make our perception of the Web platform so distant and unclear sometimes… I’m convinced that it’s time to take a look better to HTTP and to the world we all thinking to know so clearly.

Maybe it’s not so clear.

The principles i’m seeing in all these things is SIMPLICITY and the LEAST POWER one…

It’s THE MOMENT to re-think how building sites and putting data on the web, towards the Web of Data .)

Totally agreed with this post:
-> Web design 2.0 - it’s all about the resource and its URL

Site owners effectively thought of their sites as silos - a self contained object, a web of pages, with a handful of doors (links) in and out - well even if they didn’t think of them as silos they sure treated them as such. But as Tom Coates puts it Web 2.0 is about moving from a “web of pages to a web of data“:

_ A web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together. _

This has some important implications for the design of web sites. Users expect to be able to navigate directly from resource to resource. From concept to concept.

I also noticed one more thing: we concentrate us on which CMS using for a project, but not to make it TRANSPARENT to the user, or in other words, we make the technology of the backend of a web site CLEAR and EXPOSED to the user….

It’s not so right.
We must change this way of doing things.
Let’s changing it.

Starting with one of the core principles of the Web: URI don’t change.

What to leave out

[ _from URI _]

Everything! After the creation date, putting any information in the name is asking for trouble one way or another.

• Authors name- authorship can change with new versions. People quit organizations and hand things on.
• Subject. This is tricky. It always looks good at the time but changes surprisingly fast. I discuss this more below.
• Status- directories like “old” and “draft” and so on, not to mention “latest” and “cool” appear all over file systems.
• Documents change status - or there would be no point in producing drafts. The latest version of a document needs a persistent identifier whatever its status is. Keep the status out of the name.
• Access. At W3C we divide the site into “Team access”, “Member access” and “Public access”. It sounds good, but of course documents start off as team ideas, are discussed with members, and then go public. A shame indeed if every time some document is opened to wider discussion all the old links to it fail! We are switching to a simple date code now.
• File name extension. This is a very common one. “cgi”, even “.html” is something which will change. You may not be using HTML for that page in 20 years time, but you might want today’s links to it to still be valid. The canonical way of making links to the W3C site doesn’t use the extension.(how?)
• Software mechanisms. Look for “cgi”, “exec” and other give-away “look what software we are using” bits in URIs. Anyone want to commit to using perl cgi scripts all their lives? Nope? Cut out the .pl. Read the server manual on how to do it.
• Disk name - gimme a break! But I’ve seen it.

Re-learning the Web at its principles…

Towards a new way of being IN the Web .)

[ if you wnat to subscribe to my posts in english, for now use this feed, all post are in the English category, until the upcoming dagoneye.it IA step ]

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Come regalo in questi giorni di festa, ecco una parte assolutamente comprensibile e inerente ai primi livelli dello stack del Semantic Web: un filmato di qc minuto da vedere…

-> Da The Semantic Web for noobs, via PlanetRDF

In pratica si cerca di spiegare il termine Semantic, in modo che sia facilmente comprensibile e divisibile dalla sintassi con la quale comunichiamo, e nello stesso tempo si rinforza l’idea che si cerca di automatizzare alcune procedure delegate oggi all’uomo inutilmente molte volte.

Visto che siamo in tema, e anche nell’ultimo post ho citato le origini del Web, ed io stesso in questi giorni mi sto studiando meglio le sue fondamenta ( _HTTP e uso corretto delle URI in particolare… _), ecco una presentazione recente ( novembre 2007 ), che ripercorre alcuni concetti del Web, sempre fondamentali:
-> Web Past and Future

Oltre a questo, aggiungo che e’ uscito il Draft per le linee guida sull’utilizzo delle URI anche in chiave semantica, frutto di una diatriba davvero complessa e con spunti notevoli negli anni…
-> Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) more simply called “Web addresses” are at the heart of the Web and also of the Semantic Web. Cool URIs for the Semantic Web discusses two strategies for choosing URIs for the Semantic Web, gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other alternatives are less effective.

Di queste cose esempi e utilizzi pratici arriveranno… .)

Nel frattempo, alla voce Conclusioni del Draft, sono presenti i punti focali della vicenda, che mettero’ comunque maggiormente a fuoco…

Resource names on the Semantic Web should fulfill two requirements:

• First, a description of the identified resource should be retrievable with standard Web technologies.
• Second, a naming scheme should not confuse documents and the things described by the documents.

We have described two approaches that fulfill these requirements, both based on the HTTP URI scheme and protocol.

• One is to use the 303 HTTP status code to redirect from the resource identifier to the describing document.* One is to use “hash URIs” to identify resources, exploiting the fact that hash URIs are retrieved by dropping the part after the hash and retrieving the other part.

The requirement to distinguish between resources and their descriptions increases the need for coordination between multiple URIs. Some useful techniques are:

• embedding links to RDF data in HTML documents,
• using RDF statements to describe the relationship between the URIs,
• using content negotiation to redirect to an appropriate description of a resource.

Esperimenti in corso d’opera…

Content Negotiation in primis, compresa la gestione migliore della lingua di un documento .)

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