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This document is a summary of "Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition". The goal of the current document is to present the Architecture Document's principles, constraints, and good practice notes in an abbreviated format. Each entry has a title, the type of entry (principles, constraints, or good practice note), section of the Architecture Document where it is discussed, followed by the entry text. The current document is only a summary and should not be used for reference.
This document has been developed by W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) (charter).
Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than "work in progress."
principle, 1.2.3
Agent recovery from error without user consent is harmful.
constraint, 2
The identification mechanism for the Web is the URI.
principle, 2
One should assign a URI to anything that others will expect to refer to.
constraint, 2.1
Web architecture does not constrain a resource to be identified by a single URI.
practice, 2.1.1
A URI owner should not create arbitrarily different URIs for the same resource.
practice, 2.1.1
If a URI has been assigned to a resource, agents SHOULD refer to the resource using the same URI, character for character.
practice, 2.2
Avoid URI overloading.
practice, 2.4
A specification SHOULD NOT introduce a new URI scheme when an existing scheme provides the desired properties of identifiers and their relation to resources.
practice, 2.5
Agents making use of URIs MUST NOT attempt to infer properties of the referenced resource except as licensed by relevant specifications.
practice, 3.3.2
The owner of a URI with a fragment identifier who uses content negotiation to serve multiple representations of the identified resource SHOULD NOT serve representations with inconsistent fragment identifier semantics.
principle, 3.4.1
Agents MUST NOT ignore authoritative metadata without the consent of the user.
principle, 3.5
Agents do not incur obligations by retrieving a representation.
practice, 3.6
A URI owner SHOULD provide representations of the identified resource consistently and predictably.
practice, 3.6.1
A URI owner SHOULD provide representations of the identified resource.
practice, 4.2.1
A format specification SHOULD provide for version information in language instances.
practice, 4.2.2
A format specification SHOULD include information about change policies for XML namespaces.
practice, 4.2.3
A specification SHOULD provide mechanisms that allow any party to create extensions that do not interfere with conformance to the original specification.
practice, 4.2.3
A specification SHOULD specify agent behavior in the face of unrecognized extensions.
practice, 4.3
A specification SHOULD allow authors to separate content from both presentation and interaction concerns.
practice, 4.4
A specification SHOULD provide mechanisms for identifying links to other resources and to portions of representation data (via fragment identifiers).
practice, 4.4
A specification SHOULD provide mechanisms that allow Web-wide linking, not just internal document linking.
practice, 4.4
A specification SHOULD allow content authors to use URIs without constraining them to a limited set of URI schemes.
practice, 4.4
A data format SHOULD incorporate hypertext links if hypertext is the expected user interface paradigm.
practice, 4.5.3
A specification that establishes an XML vocabulary SHOULD place all element names and global attribute names in a namespace.
practice, 4.5.4
The owner of an XML namespace name SHOULD make available material intended for people to read and material optimized for software agents in order to meet the needs of those who will use the namespace vocabulary. When a namespace representation is provided by the namespace URI owner, that material is authoritative.
practice, 4.5.5
A specification in which QNames represent URI/local-name pairs SHOULD NOT allow both Qnames and URIs in attribute values or element content, where they would be indistinguishable.
practice, 4.5.5
A specification in which QNames serve as resource identifiers MUST provide a mapping to URIs.
practice, 4.5.7
In general, a representation provider SHOULD NOT assign Internet media types beginning with "text/" to XML representations.
practice, 4.5.7
In general, a representation provider SHOULD NOT specify the character encoding for XML data in protocol headers since the data is self-describing.