This is a transition request. Whereas
the Technical Architecture Group has decided (25Oct) to request that you advance this specification to W3C Proposed Recommendation and call for its review and endorsement by the W3C membership.
W3C Working Draft 16 August 2004
Abstract
The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.
The changes since last call include a number of editorial modifications, plus:
Status (Proposed)
see also: First draft of status section for PR document
This is [not yet] a Proposed Rec. It was first released as a 30 August 2002 Working Draft and has been refined in light of comments on a best-effort basis until the 16 August 2004 Last Call Working Draft; since then, all issues raised in public-webarch-comments have been formally addressed.
Reviews are due 8 Dec 2004. provided we ship by 5Nov, according toplan.
hmm... can't find proposed rec boilerplate in process document pubrules, nor transition how-to.
The TAG started meeting in January 2002; after a period of collecting architectural issues and drafting smaller findings, we release the first Working Draft of webarch, 30 Aug 2002. The working draft was revised a number of times in light of discussion and comments from www-tag.
We released a last call Working Draft 9 Dec 2003 whose scope includes some, but not all of the architectural issues. We decided that progressing this document through the W3C Recommendation Track at this time is of greater value to the community than waiting until all of the architectural issues have been covered, and the 231 issues raised in response to this draft confirm that the community finds it valuable, or at least interesting. We engaged the following peer groups in the last call process:
Addressing the comments on the Dec 2003 draft resulted in such pervasive changes to the document that we reached a point where it was no longer clear which comments remained relevant, so we issued another last call Working Draft, 6 August 2004. We received comments from 18 reviewers ( Amielh, Bray, Dubost, Hawke, Hayes, Hazaël-Massieux, Henderson/QA WG, Ishikawa, Jacobs, Klyne, Kopecky, Masinter, Meyer, Pemberton/HTML WG, Stickler, Uhl, Weitzner, drewangel ) in the last call review period from 6 August 2004 to 17 September 2004 or shortly thereafter. We reached a clear consensus with the reviewer in many cases (37 threads, including spam and off-topic comments). Addressing some comments involved several rounds of negotiation; for example, a joint meeting with the QA WG 27 Sep. In some cases (Weitzner, drewangel, Henderson/QA, Bray) , we recieved neither confirmation nor dissent to our ultimate reply.
There are 3 cases of outstanding dissent:
... The termsAfter several more rounds of negoitation with the commentor, his most recent 28 Oct response says "I cannot live with the text as it stands. [...] Neither of these sections currently mentions the special handling necessary for URIs with fragment identifiers [...]".primaryandsecondaryin this context do not limit the nature of the resource; they are not classes. In this context, primary and secondary simply indicate that there is a relationship between the resources..
XLink was issued without reaching consensus, and did not follow due W3C process. This makes it an inappropriate specification for underpinning the Web architecture until such time as consensus has been achieved.
The TAG considered this comment in a discussion of 7 Oct, and decided to "add that XLink is not the only linking design that has been proposed for XML, nor is it universally accepted as a good design. to section 4.5.2. Links in XML" (now available in section 4.5.2. Links in XML of the editor's draft) . When asked if this was acceptable, the reply said:
I am afraid not. They responded very strongly that it is not acceptable to
recommend a spec that has not reached consensus within W3C. They object in
particular to the wording "[XLink] is an appropriate specification" and
"Designers of XML-based formats should consider using XLink".
20 Oct
While we regret that we were unable to achieve consensus with these reviewers, we suggest that the document is sufficiently valuable to the community in its present state to merit advancement to Proposed Recommendation.
The subject of the Web Architecture document is not quite the sort of technology that is deployed by direct implementation in software, and hence we do not have a suite of tests by which we test conformance. Rather, the principles in this document are deployed by people developing technologies, tools, content, etc. In particular, they are deployed by other W3C working groups. We have had a number of succesful interactions with other Working Groups regarding principles in the Web Architecture document:
Agents MUST NOT ignore message metadata without the consent of the userderived from a principle,
Agents that recover from error by making a choice without the user's consent are not acting on the user's behalf.
See also: some notes on implementation experience with each principle, constraint, and good practice
since Revision: 1.14 Date: 2004/10/25 21:32:32, announced to chairs@w3.org Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:38:43 -0500:
$Log: prreq.html,v $ Revision 1.16 2004/11/01 19:48:51 connolly cite newer SOTD, more implemenation experience doc Revision 1.15 2004/10/28 20:42:53 connolly 18 reviewers, not 17, including Bray Bray has a thread in commentor-wait 37 closed thread, not 31 dissent += Kopecky on secondary resources