RE: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 03:33 PM 05/01/01 -0800, Michael Brennan wrote:
>This makes me think, now, that perhaps RDDL should include an "expires"
>attribute 

Yeah, that could be useful.  Given a little discussion, we
could think up a few dozen other things that it might be useful.
But the lesson the Web teaches, reinforced by XML, is that the 
way forward lies in Daring To Do Less.  I'd say the right thing 
to do with RDDL or equivalent is get it out there, get some 
people using it, then the users can tell you what the important 
things you left out are, rather than you guessing in advance.  
Right now it's got one (1) machine-readable label in the arcrole=, 
one (1) hopefully-dereferencable URI in xlink:href=, some 
accompanying text, and an optional content-type= attribute.
We could lose the last and maybe should; then we'd have the
bare minimum.

Important acronym: MPRDV.  Minimum Progress Required to Declare
Victory.  This was Tim B-L's great leap - take hypertext and
throw away guaranteed persistence and typing and address 
indirection and statefulness and transaction semantics and
flexible document types and hey, what you have is still useful
and anyone can implement it!

XML 1.0 almost but not quite blew it by including too much stuff.

Pardon my Friday-afternoon rant. -Tim