[whatwg] RDFa Features

Ben Adida ben at adida.net
Thu Aug 28 14:46:27 PDT 2008


Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
> Ian's question was about what happens when it goes down forever, or gets
> taken over, intercepted, squatted, spoofed or redirected because of a
> malicious DNS.

Okay, let's get rid of a few cases. Malicious DNS will break
*everything* if you don't have DNSSEC. Google isn't Google, none of your
lookups are trustworthy, etc...

You're effectively saying "what if the web breaks completely?"

Well then, there's no web metadata, but there's no web either, so what's
the point.

Now, what happens if the host goes down *forever* on its own. That's an
interesting question. It hasn't been an issue for Dublin Core or
Creative Commons for quite a few years. Hopefully folks who publish
vocabularies would find ways to let them live on whenever the domain
changes hands. But if it doesn't, well, yes, that would make that
vocabulary a lot less useful, since one would not be able to look it up.
One might have to build into applications the knowledge that this host
has gone down.

Still, a lot less work than having to build into every parser the
knowledge of *every* possible vocabulary ahead of time.

-Ben




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