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

[Daniel Paul O'Donnell]

It sounds like there is a consensus among those contributing to the 
discussion in broad terms on this. I think it is fair to say that that 
consensus also sees the order of importance as being the Guidelines 
structure, then the front page of the guidelines, then the rest of the 
web site if it comes along for free or cheap. If the extension rewriting 
becomes an issue then we may need to go with static extensions as you 
suggest. That would scale pretty easily across the whole site, BTW, I think.

As for leadership and time frame, I wonder if the next stage is not to 
take this proposal as a statement of principle and then to ask you and 
James to continue your work with an eye to developing a more specific 
workplan for implementation: i.e. after the conversations with Chris and 
Shayne and perhaps some experimentation, a producing a proposal for 
action that has settled the question of what's most feasibly implemented 
on issues like extensionless URLs, extending the plan across the 
website, and so on. We might then be able to do the final work in the fall?

I'm glad this is moving: the Vault has been a desideratum (and fairly 
urgent at that) for quite some time. Hopefully this is addressing the 
issues.

-dan

David Sewell wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/