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- It can be hard for servers to detect a terminal '?' as different from the absence of a query string. It is in fact impossible in Tomcat, and requires rewrite rules in Apache.
- unlike '...??' (legal URL), '...?' is not a "legal" URL, so software libraries don't pass it through
- Although '?' is intuitive and language-agnostic, it can also be puzzling to some people.
- The metadata to be returned was only vaguely defined (mostly by example).
- The metadata syntax (ANVL) was non-standard and largely defined by example.
Requirements and Desiderata
- Some continuity with past
- human- and machine-readable metadata returned
- including persistence statements
- who/what/when/where paradigm (ERC)
- THUMP-like request protocol -- ?info(X,Y) vs ?info&arg1=X&arg2=Y
- Never RDF
- unfortunately, JSON-LD is RDF; see tweet https://twitter.com/justin_littman/status/1206944465027584001
- however, widely used schema.org borrows elements names from JSON-LD and uses them in meta tags, which aren't at risk of RDF complexity
Proposed solution discussions, in reverse chronological order
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