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

Smylers Smylers at stripey.com
Fri May 15 03:47:11 PDT 2009


Eduard Pascual writes:

> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Smylers <Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > 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.)
> 
> It would need to be machine-readable for tools like
> http://search.creativecommons.org/ to do their job: check the license
> against the engine's built-in knowledge of some licenses, and figure
> out if it is suitable for the usages the user has requested (like
> "search for content I can build upon" or "search for content I can use
> commercialy"). Ideally, a search engine should have enough with
> finding the video on either Tara's site *or* Paul's blog for it to be
> available for users.

Yeah, that sounds plausible.  However that's what I meant by "a
different scenario" -- adding criteria to the above, specifically about
searching.  Hixie attempted to address this case too:

> > > > Admittedly, if this scenario is taken in the context of the
> > > > first scenario, meaning that Bob wants this image to be
> > > > discoverable through search, but doesn't want to include it on a
> > > > page of its own, then extra syntax to mark this particular image
> > > > up would be useful.
> > > >
> > > > However, in my research I found very few such cases. In every
> > > > case where I found multiple media items on a single page with no
> > > > dedicated page, either every item was licensed identically and
> > > > was the main content of the page, or each item had its own
> > > > separate page, or the items were licensed under the same license
> > > > as the page. In all three of these cases, rel=license already
> > > > solves the problem today.

To which Nils responded:

> > > Relying on linked pages just to get licensing information would
> > > be, well, massive overhead. Still, you are right - most blogs
> > > using many pictures have dedicated pages.

It's perfectly valid to disagree with this being sufficient (I
personally have no view either way on the matter).  I was just
clarifying that the legend mark-up example wasn't attempting to address
this case, and wasn't proposing <legend><small> (or whatever) as a
machine-readable microformat.

Smylers



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