[whatwg] [Fwd: Re: Helping people seaching for content filtered by license]

[Smylers]

Nils Dagsson Moskopp writes:

> Am Freitag, den 08.05.2009, 19:57 +0000 schrieb Ian Hickson:
> 
> >      * Tara runs a video sharing web site for people who want
> >        licensing information to be included with their videos. When
> >        Paul wants to blog about a video, he can paste a fragment of
> >        HTML provided by Tara directly into his blog. The video is
> >        then available inline in his blog, along with any licensing
> >        information about the video.
> > 
> > This can be done with HTML5 today. For example, here is the markup you 
> > could include to allow someone to embed a video on their site while 
> > including the copyright or license information:
> > 
> >    <figure>
> >     <video src="http://example.com/videodata/sJf-ulirNRk" controls>
> >      <a href="http://video.example.com/watch?v=sJf-ulirNRk">Watch</a>
> >     </video>
> >     <legend>
> >      Pillar post surgery, starting to heal.
> >      <small>© copyright 2008 Pillar. All Rights Reserved.</small>
> >     </legend>
> >    </figure>
> 
> Seriously, I don't get it. Is there really so much entrenched (widely
> deployed, a mess, IE-style) software out there relying on @rel=license
> meaning "license of a single main content blob"

Merely using rel=license in the above example would not cause the
copyright message to be displayed to users.

> that an unambigous (read: machine-readable) writeup of part licenses
> is impossible ?

Why does the license information need to be machine-readable in this
case?  (It may need to be for a different scenario, but that would be
dealt with separately.)

> > The example above shows this for a movie, but it works as well for a
> > photo:
> > 
> >    <figure>
> >      <img src="http://nearimpossible.com/DSCF0070-1-tm.jpg" alt="">
> >      <legend>
> >       Picture by Bob.
> >       <small><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/legalcode">Creative 
> >       Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License</a></small>
> >      </legend>
> >    </figure>
> 
> Can I infer from this that an <a> in a <small> inside a <legend> is
> some kind of microformat for licensing information ?

No.  But if a human sees a string that mentions "© copyright" or
"license" then she's likely to realize it's licencing information.  And
if it's placed next to a picture it's conventional to interpret that as
applying to a picture.  It's also conventional for such information to
be small, because it's usually not the main content the user is
interested in when choosing to view the page.

Magazines and the like have been using this convention for years,
without any need to explicitly define what indicates licensing
information, seemingly without any ambiguity or confusion.

Smylers