[tei-council] Proposal for TEI website stable URIs and archiving

[David Sewell]

Responses to specific points are interleaved below.

If there is a consensus that Council would like to move ahead with 
implementing this, our next requirement (as Sebastian pointed out) is to 
ascertain who will take responsibility and what time frame we can commit 
to. Before we do anything else, I can get together with Chris R. and 
Shayne to talk about what sorts of reconfiguration and automated 
scripting they consider feasible. (I don't have a user account on 
www.tei-c.org myself, so I can't just go in and poke around among the 
OpenCMS and Apache config files from off-site.)

David

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009, Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote:

> Thanks David and James! This is really interesting. I have a couple of 
> questions/points.
>
> The first is that there are really three things going on here, as I 
> understand it:
>
>  1. a proposal about persistent URIs for the Guidelines and Archival
>     Material in the Vault
>  2. a proposal about persistence and multi-format delivery for the
>     website as a whole based on 1
>  3. a proposal for the reorganisation and presentation of the
>     Guidelines from the tei-c.org front page
>
> Is that a fair summary?

Yes.

> Assuming it is, then my first question is how functionally important is 
> proposal 2 and 3 to the realisation of proposal 1? If we need to triage these 
> proposals or assign them to different groups of people, how related are they. 
> I agree very much with your comments in point three--I've often been tempted 
> to jump in and just rewrite the P5 index page if bothers me so--though I can 
> imagine there may be other aesthetic ideas about where the link from 
> tei-c.org/index should go. But it seems to me to be a distinct issue from 
> points 1 and 2--and hence something that could be assigned to a distinct 
> individual or group.

Yes, point 4 in the proposal document ("Simplify access to current
Guidelines") is mostly my own addition, and is quite separable from the
other proposals. And I think that it also needs input from the TEI
website committee. The rationale for including it now is that it
connects with the whole topic of canonical locations.

> In the case of 1 and 2, I don't know how distinct the two solutions are. Can 
> we redo the Guidelines as extensionless URIs as you propose without doing the 
> rest of the site? Is it the same amount of effort to carry through the 
> extensionless URIs to the whole site as it is to just the Guidelines and the 
> Vault? Would pushing an extensionless system through the whole site delay in 
> any way the development of an extensionless system for the Guidelines and 
> Vault or delay the migration of the Vault to Virginia?

The answers to some of these questions depend on input from Chris and
Shayne as they would mostly likely be tasked with changes to server
configuration. Extensionless URIs might in fact turn out to be more
trouble than they are worth. The archiving system and directory
structures in our proposal could be implemented without changing the
existing conventions for file extensions (mostly using *.xml for
content).

> In Lyon, Council expressed an interest in assuming responsibility for the 
> Vault, in part as part of this desire to have persistent URIs for Guideline 
> versions. Since the Vault and its migration has been a thorn for many years 
> now and since the Oxford server hosting it (as I understand it) is on its 
> last legs, it seems to me that making sure the URI system is implemented for 
> the Vault and Guidelines is of the highest priority. While I like the 
> proposal to extent this to the rest of the site, I would not want to see 
> issues in or debates about rolling this out for copies of our minutes or our 
> membership page slow down rolling it out for the Guidelines.
>
> I think my preference would be to see the migration of the Vault and the 
> developments you propose for extensionless URIs executed above all else. The 
> changes to the index page too, while a separate matter, I think, seem 
> reasonablely Council's business as well, and hence easy to implement at the 
> same time. Only if rolling out the extensionless URIs across the site as a 
> whole can be done without adversely impacting rolling the Guidelines work 
> would I see that as being an immediate priority--for this group, at least. I 
> think (2) is a very good idea, but less important than (1) and (3) unless it 
> is possible to do without much thought as a simple extension of applying the 
> scheme to the Guidelines and Vault.
>
> All that being said, finally, I do think that we probably are in need of one 
> of those periodic reviews of the general website that all websites require. 
> We'll (hopefully) be adding a webstore very soon and it would be also nice to 
> automate our news--perhaps making better use of the Sourceforge feed as James 
> has suggested. For that reason it might be a good idea to schedule your 
> suggestion (2) as part of a more general re-fluffing of the site as a whole. 
> In that case, I'd say let's see f we can implement (1) and (3) before the 
> member's meeting this year and then commission some more detailed work on the 
> site as a whole for 2010. Would that make sense?
>
> Anyway, thanks very much for really solid work on a problem that I think we 
> all thought was going to be easier to solve! I hope this will finally allow 
> us to open the vault and translate (in the liturgical sense) its contents to 
> a new home. Lazare veni foras!
>
> -dan
>
> vid Sewell wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> James and I have been conferring on a proposal for stable (or "canonic")
>> URIs for documentation on the website, including the archiving of
>> TEI releases. The proposal is here:
>> 
>> http://lister.ei.virginia.edu/~drs2n/uri-proposal.html
>> 
>> Please take a look at this and offer feedback.
>> 
>> The proposals assume that we can make some changes to directory
>> structures and the ways that certain files are named or URLs are
>> resolved on www.tei-c.org. Some of these changes would be technically
>> more complicated than others. Any proposal that we agree on will still
>> need to be considered by the people responsible for administering the
>> server, namely Chris Ruotolo and sysadmin Shayne Brandon; if their
>> verdict is that some things are difficult or unworkable, we may have to
>> revisit the recommendations. (The proposal for extensionless URIs is the
>> most likely source of difficulty, I think.)
>> 
>> David
>>
>> 
>
>

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
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Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
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