[whatwg] Helping people seaching for content filtered by license

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:37 AM, Bruce D'Arcus<bdarcus at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> But why can't one have "the best of both worlds" without having to go
> to separate pages for each photo?

Hopefully you have a separate page for each photo *anyway*.  If you
don't - that is, if you only have a thumbnails page, and then a
js-based fullsize viewer - your page is pretty crappy in terms of
accessibility and discoverability.

Given that of course we all value making our pages accessible ^_^, the
problem is already solved.  The js-based viewer is merely a
convenience for those that can use it, and license information can be
embedded on the individual pages.

>>> 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.
>
> Depends what you mean by "covered". I'd say the RDFa examples of this
> "cover" it better in the sense that they don't impose an arbitrary
> restriction that the license only applies to a single object (or I
> suppose group of objects).

The restriction is far from arbitrary - it makes it dead-simple.  Any
solution that allows you to assign different licenses to various
pieces of content on a single page in a machine-readable way is
necessarily more complex.  It's not apparent in these examples that
anything more complex is necessary.

Regardless, though, the situation is *indeed* covered.  The fact that
you can imagine a slightly different solution doesn't change the fact
that existing markup is *a* solution, at least for any halfway decent
site design.

>>> 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.
>
> This isn't really my area, but I could imagine an organization (in
> particular) wanting to include machine-readable license links (a la
> CC).

Can you illustrate this more plainly?

~TJ