[whatwg] Helping people seaching for content filtered by license

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Bruce D'Arcus<bdarcus at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 3:46 AM, Eduard Pascual<herenvardo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>> This has some implications:
>>>>
>>>>  - Each unit of content (recipe in this case) must have its own
>>>>   independent page at a distinct URL. This is actually good practice
>>>>   anyway today for making content discoverable from search engines, and
>>>>   it is compatible with what people already do, so this seems fine.
>>>
>>> This is, on a wide range of cases, entirely impossible: while it might
>>> work, and maybe it's even good practice, for contents that can be
>>> represented on the web as a HTML document, it is not achievable for
>>> many other formats. Here are some obvious cases:
>>>
>>> Pictures (and other media) used on a page: An author might want to
>>> have protected content, but to allow re-use of some media under
>>> certain licenses. A good example of this are online media libraries,
>>> which have a good deal of media available for reuse but obviously
>>> protect the resources that inherently belong to the site (such as the
>>> site's own logo and design elements): Having a separate page to
>>> describe each resource's licensing is not easily achievable, and may
>>> be completelly out of reach for small sites that handle all their
>>> content by hand (most prominently, desginer's portfolio sites that
>>> offer many of their contents under some "attribution" license to
>>> promote their work).
>>
>> Even on small sites, though, if they have a picture gallery they
>> almost certainly have the ability to view each picture individually as
>> well, usually by clicking on the picture itself.  That's the page
>> you'd put the license information on.
>
> What about the case where you have a JS-based viewer, and so when the
> user clicks a photo, they do not go to a separate page, but instead
> get a pop-up viewer?

That is indeed a valid concern.  The obvious way to address it is to
have a permalink on the JS popup, which will send you to an individual
page with that content where the license info is located.  In this
scenario the JS viewer is merely a convenience, allowing you to view
the pictures without a page refresh, rather than a necessity.
Hopefully that's true anyway, for accessibility reasons!

Thus you get the best of both worlds - machine-readable data on the
individual pages, and you can still put human-readable license info on
the JS popup.

> Surely that's common, and it's entirely feasible that different photos
> on the page would have different licenses.

I don't think it's that common for different photos on the page to
have different licenses (and preventing that scenario is just one more
reason to fight license proliferation), but even if true it's covered
by the above.

> Or another case: a weblog that includes third-party photo content
> (could be your own photos too). You want to label your blog text with
> one license, and the linked photos with another.

This is indeed not covered by @rel=license.  Is it necessary to embed
the separate licensing information for the pictures in a
machine-readable way?  It seems that just putting a human-readable
license link on each picture would work pretty well.

~TJ