Welcome to part 2/10 of the #back2blog series.
I spent some hours yesterday getting familiar with the microdata specification (and most importantly, which specification to follow), in order to inject semantic “Event”, “Person” and “CreativeWork” data into some under-production web projects.
While reading through Google’s Rich snippets tutorials, I noticed that the links to the ISO date format page were broken, showing a “page not found” error at the ISO website.
Being geographically close to the ISO headquarters (in the sense that I have a glimpse at their building each time I’m passing the Geneva train station)…
…and having followed their recent website redesign by Andy Clarke, I felt connected enough, so I decided to just let them know. A short Twitter conversation followed:
hi @isostandards, remember that cool URIs don't change? certainly this one shouldn't http://t.co/3TUkCOSjFJ /cc @timberners_lee :)
— Manuel Schmalstieg (@16kbit) March 11, 2013
@isostandards thanks for taking notice! Fyi, it's through google's microdata webmaster help pages that I came across the dead link.
— Manuel Schmalstieg (@16kbit) March 12, 2013
Am I satisfied with their answer? So-so. Why can’t they keep the old structure active? Why hasn’t the redirect been implemented as soon as they changed it? And why has that page so little useful information, compared to this archived version of 2011? Isn’t that ISO 8601 standard (Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times) an important asset or our global culture?
If you truly want to know the answers, I guess you need to order a paper copy of the full standard. It’s selling for a mere CHF 134,00 over here.
PS: If you’re wondering why I cc’d Sir @timberners_lee, read his famous statement “Cool URIs don’t change”: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html.
Make sure you read the last paragraph. And notice the irony: the URI of that article doesn’t comply with its own recommendations! :)
This entry is part 2/10 of the #back2blog series.