Journal: News & Comment

Ceci n'est pas un website

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Tim Bray tries to define how an individual web page could identify itself as part of a website. It's not as obvious as you might think, since Internet standards currently don't define any such thing.

Take this site, for example. Even when you see www.penmachine.com/[something] in your browser, there could be all sorts of other stuff there. On this very page, the link list in the right column is served by an entirely different computer than the one that sends you this text, and some of the pictures are from different places too, as are the statistics and site search.

They're all part of penmachine.com, but I only really control some of them—and the computer that hosts my site also hosts dozens (maybe hundreds) of others I don't even know about. Similarly, I host some of my friends' sites on my server, but you wouldn't think of them as part of penmachine.com.

So where do sites begin and end? What about pages that are parts of more than one site? Is it really worth worrying about? I guess it gets to be, such as if someone sues you for something "on your website," when it may or may not be by your definition.

 |