Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Nathan Yergler <nathan AT yergler.net>]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Dan Mills <dan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
<snip>
> Regardless of the markup format for the "immutable" document, I think
> my primary concern is making it easy for a software agent to "follow
> its nose" from the license URI to the immutable legalcode. (I
> *thought* there was follow-your-nose markup from the deed to the
> legalcode, but I don't see it now, so maybe I'm mis-remembering.)
> Figuring out what the right predicate is shouldn't be super difficult,
> and would fit in the existing ecosystem.
>
>
> Were you thinking of a link? "The license on this page was generated from
> [link]" ?
>

Yes, but more specifically a machine-readable annotated anchor tag, or
link tag in head. Something that software could use to unambiguously
arrive at the immutable source. My thinking is that we give people the
deed as the canonical URI of the license (great!). It should then be
possible to write software that retrieves the immutable document and
compares it to some reference, so you can confirm that the copy you
received (or looked at last week) hasn't changed.

>
>
> For what it's worth, we added support for "stripped down" legalcode in
> 2010 (I think). For example,
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode-plain. That
> file is generated from the static HTML, and having
> markdown/restructured text/something less expressive would have made
> life a little easier.
>
>
> Hah.
>
> Yeah, so that plain format could be close to being acceptable as a *source*
> if we really want to use HTML (modulo the stylesheet and JS tags).

Hilariously, though, it's generated from the existing legalcode HTML
(Inception!) --
http://code.creativecommons.org/viewgit/cc.engine.git/tree/cc/engine/licenses/views.py#n183

NRY



>
> Dan