In support of draft-nottingham-http-link-header-01

Dear IESG members,

I'm writing on behalf of the POWDER Working Group at W3C [1] to support 
the draft submitted by Mark Nottingham, dated 14 March 2008 [2]. The WG 
would like to see this become an RFC.

The use case we have for the HTTP Link header is set out in an e-mail 
sent to the W3C TAG mailing list [3] which quotes from and builds 
directly on our use cases document [4]. In essence, the Protocol for Web 
Description Resources (POWDER) is designed to facilitate greater 
personalisation of Internet content through the provision of metadata 
that can be created separately from the multiple resources it describes 
and that can be authenticated.

A typical use case would be whether or not to include links to other 
resources on a page delivered to a mobile device, whether to recommend 
certain resources for school study and so on. In each case, the ability 
to find the metadata without having to parse the relevant resource 
offers a substantial optimisation in processing.

HTTP Link, as set our by Mark Nottingham, achieves this. A HEAD request 
to a given resource would be sufficient to identify the location of any 
Description Resources that may be available. Moreover, for some resource 
types, it offers the only practical way to provide the link to the 
Description Resource.

The POWDER WG intends to submit a proposal for at least one relationship 
type to be used in HTTP Link Headers.

The relevant section of our Recommendation Track documentation is at [5].

Incidentally, if we are successful in reaching full Recommendation 
status, it is likely that PICS [6] will be withdrawn.  It would be 
appropriate in that case to withdraw the PICS HTTP Header too.

Yours faithfully

Phil Archer
POWDER WG Chair.


[1] http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
[2] 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-01.txt
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Mar/0114.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/powder-use-cases/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-powder-dr-20080317/#assoc
[6] http://www.w3.org/PICS/


-- 
Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer,
Family Online Safety Institute
w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/

Received on Tuesday, 22 April 2008 11:33:13 UTC