TrellixTech.com Weblog

The last few weeks have been very busy for the SMBmeta initiative. I've been talking to lots of different parties, from search engine companies to domain registrars to Internet Industry pundits, in order to move the initiative ahead. I've also been attending conferences, making pitches. In the process, various components that would make up the "ecosystem" necessary to get adoption going of SMBmeta Data have become clear. In addition, I've been programming working prototypes of these components to help the development of proposed APIs. I've also added the <affirmation> element to the Version 0.9 Proposed Specification. It's all continuing to be very exciting.

At this point, I have a new essay about the proposed ecosystem, complete with a diagram. I also have initial working protoypes of a directory, a registry, and a proxy, and have been running them against real SMBmeta files out there in the web. Soon, I'll have an Affirmation Authority, too. At that point, when it seems to all work (which will make it easier to stablize the APIs), I'll publish the source code and open up the prototypes to the public for comment.

-DanB

Listening to a lot of the feedback, and looking at sample SMBmeta files created by various companies around the world, I've updated the SMBmeta Specification, releasing Version 0.9. This should be nearly complete. It includes the <coordinates> and <accessibility> elements I mentioned previously. (The one area left will have to do with affirmation, where some other web site vouches for some of what you put in your SMBmeta file.)

To go along with this, Version 1.1a of the SMBmeta File Creation Utility was released on www.smbmeta.org. The version 0.9 SMBmeta file format is upward compatible with the original version 0.1, so old smbmeta.xml files do not need to be updated.

In addition to this, I've been doing work to prototype other parts of a full system that takes advantage of SMBmeta, including a sample registry, proxy, and aggregator. Once they are done and preliminary written specifications done, I hope to post them for comment. At that point, it should be clear what you would need to do to support SMBmeta in different ways.

Thanks to everybody who has been helping this Initiative get this far. It's been very exciting.

-DanB