Re: link relationship registration

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:50:09 +0100, Phil Archer <phil@philarcher.org>  
wrote:
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>  Also, I definitely do not want to start having to implement support  
>> for http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/stylesheet besides just  
>> stylesheet. (Not for the Link HTTP header or for the HTML elements.)  
>> That's just additional complexity for no gain and will only lead to  
>> bugs and differences among browsers.
>
> There shouldn't be any need for UAs to resolve tokens given as values  
> for @rel as absolute URIs and no one's suggesting that UAs should  
> actually make an HTTP request of any kind to iana.org every time there's  
> a link to a stylesheet. It's the person minting the new relationship  
> type that needs to check. What it means is that if you create a link  
> (HTML or HTTP) and use a @rel type 'foo' that gives a 404 from  
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/foo then you really shouldn't  
> expect UAs to do anything sensible with it.
>
> Whether a UA chooses to actually implement support for a registered @rel  
> type remains very much up to the UA developer of course.

The concern is that besides supporting stylesheet (and it's case variants)  
we'd also have to support  
http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/stylesheet meaning the same  
thing. And thus also http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/alternate  
and the special behavior you get when both (stylesheet and alternate) are  
specified. We can map http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/stylesheet  
to stylesheet and such first, but I don't think adding another layer of  
complexity is justified.

(I'm not at all concerned about UAs having to fetch such URIs, as any such  
proposal would be stillborn.)


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>