comments on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-04

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> See:
>   
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-04.txt 
> ...

Thanks, Mark. We're almost there, it seems.

A few comments:


Section 4.2:

"An extension relation type is a URI [RFC3986] that, when dereferenced, 
SHOULD yield a document describing that relation type."

It seems to me that "SHOULD" is way too strong here:

1) As that document is not required in any way to process the link 
relation, not providing it won't affect interoperability at all.

2) It also seems to invite dereferencing, which I expect many will oppose.

Proposal: rephrase this in a way similar to RFC 3648, Section 5.1:

"For collections that are ordered, the client SHOULD identify the 
semantics of the ordering with a URI in the Ordering-Type header, ... 
Setting the value to a URI that identifies the ordering semantics 
provides the information a human user or software package needs to 
insert new collection members into the ordering intelligently. Although 
the URI in the Ordering-Type header MAY point to a resource that 
contains a definition of the semantics of the ordering, clients SHOULD 
NOT access that resource to avoid overburdening its server. ..." -- 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc3648.html#rfc.section.5.1>


Section 5:

   link-value        = "<" URI-Reference ">" *( ";" link-param ) )

Syntax error (duplicate ")"), replace with:

   link-value        = "<" URI-Reference ">" *( ";" link-param )

Also:

   enc2231-string    = <extended-value, see <xref target="RFC2231"/>,
                       Section 7>

Syntax error (you have an escaped xref element in the artwork), replace 
with:

   enc2231-string    = <extended-value, see [RFC2231], Section 7>

(note prose values can't extend over multiple lines, btw)


Section 5:

"indicates that chapter2 is previous to this resource in a logical 
navigation path."

For readability, I'd put chapter2 into quotes here.


Section 5 -- Examples:

I think the example in Section 5 should be moved into a subsection, and 
we also should have an additional example showing the use of (1) 
multiple link values in one header, and (2) use of title*.


6.2 -- Nits:

"...[RFC2026], section 7)"

s/section/Section/



Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 26 February 2009 14:52:45 UTC