I'd like to discuss the proliferation of well-known URLs, notably the new one proposed in draft-nottingham-site-meta-01.

I talked to Eran Hammer-Lahav about this, but he suggested I bring it up here:

I object to the use of /host-meta for two reasons:

1) I feel that /host-meta is too casual of a name and prone to collisions.  It matches /^[\w\-]+$/, which I think is a subset of a fair number of sites' usernames.

2) There are already too many well-known URLs cluttering up the namespace:

/robots.txt
/favicon.ico
/crossdomain.xml

We can't fix those, but rather than make another one (and don't kid yourself: /host-meta won't be the last one) and make the situation worse, I propose we do the respectful thing and make a well-known directory to put this and all future well-known files in.  e.g.:

/;well_known/host-meta

i.e. put something ugly and weird in there, like a semicolon, to minimize the chance that it interferes with people's existing URL structure.

Hopefully when the next spec decides to add a new well-known URL, they put it under /;well_known/.  "But host-meta is the final one, forever!", you say.  I doubt it.  XRD will become passé, or people will object to doing two HTTP requests when they really want to do one, so yet another well-known URL will be born.  Let's give it a future home now.

Thoughts?

- Brad


_______________________________________________
Apps-Discuss mailing list
Apps-Discuss <at> ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/apps-discuss

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Brad Fitzpatrick <brad <at> danga.com> wrote:
> I'd like to discuss the proliferation of well-known URLs, notably the new
> one proposed in draft-nottingham-site-meta-01.
>
> I talked to Eran Hammer-Lahav about this, but he suggested I bring it up
> here:
>
> I object to the use of /host-meta for two reasons:
>
> 1) I feel that /host-meta is too casual of a name and prone to collisions.
> It matches /^[\w\-]+$/, which I think is a subset of a fair number of sites'
> usernames.

Perhaps, but I don't see any cause for concern here;

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:host-meta

>
> 2) There are already too many well-known URLs cluttering up the namespace:
>
> /robots.txt
> /favicon.ico
> /crossdomain.xml
>
> We can't fix those, but rather than make another one (and don't kid
> yourself: /host-meta won't be the last one)

I agree, but because there will be people who don't know about the
protocol, and that will be the case no matter which protocol is used.

> and make the situation worse, I
> propose we do the respectful thing and make a well-known directory to put
> this and all future well-known files in.  e.g.:

The Web doesn't have directories, it has URIs,

and both what you
describe, and what's in the draft, define a well known URI per domain.
 So I really don't see any practical difference here.

Brad,

Sounds like a good idea, though I'd avoid using characters which are likely to break scripts/filters/etc.

Perhaps something like "/__meta__" would be a better bet?