Reviving HTTP Header Linking: Some code and use-cases

Hi, I'm Harry Halpin, and I'm working on GRDDL (Gleaning Resource
Descriptions from Dialects of Language) with the W3C, a rather neat
technology that helps us get uniform metadata from diverse XML, (X)HTML,
microformats, and (hopefully soon) HTML documents using a simple mix of
widely deployed technologies.

I'd just like to send a e-mail to see if we can revive Mark Nottingham's
"HTTP Header Linking Draft", from which we in particular would like to
see the Link and Profile headers revived [1]. What's the current status
of this idea?

We'd like to see this as an IETF-approved part of HTTP. Reviving
Nottingham's draft would solve a big problem for us. In order for
authors of documents on the Web to tell agents that there is a transform
to get data out of their data, they need a link to the transform and the
ability for the agent to tell that link is actually not just an ordinary
link, but the link of a GRDDL transform. This is absolutely needed for
the cases where the document owner may want to authorize to the
transformation, but may not want to add the information to the header of
*every* document in the collection or have access to the document. A
use-case given by Ian Davis of Talis has been written in more detail [2].

We also have running code that implements this feature in the Jena Java
implementation of GRDDL [3]. It's a simple feature for implementers to
implement, and if even more people gave head's up to this feature I
believe there would be many more implementers who would add this
feature. thanks, harry

[1]http://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-00.txt
[2]http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-scenarios/#header_use_case
[3]http://jena.sourceforge.net/grddl/

-- 
		-harry

Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh 
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426

Received on Sunday, 9 March 2008 18:54:15 UTC