RE: Reviving HTTP Header Linking: Some code and use-cases

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> However, RDF pretty much screwed us all on that one, so the 
> reasonable next step is to allow URIs and have all flat names 
> be relative to the same link relationship registry as Atom.

HTTP cannot share the same link registry as Atom unless the Atom link
registry is completely redone. The whole registry is specific to Atom or
feed processing.

Furthermore, the Atom mechanism for registration means that any
registered link relation has two names: "xxx" and
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/xxx". This has made processing
links in Atom feeds unnecessarily tedious. It would be better to come up
with a new mechanism that either required everything to be an IRI or at
least didn't allow registered link relations to be used with the IRI
form.

The Atom mechanism does comparisons character-for-character. An IRI and
its URI equivalent do not match. That means that RFC 3987 IRI-URI
conversion cannot be used for the Link header; instead, something like
percent-encoded Unicode would be needed.

The "title" subfield is also problematic. It must be properly
internationalized, including proper support for Ruby annotations and
BIDI text. If that can happen, then I would like to see a "Title:"
header field too, so that I can HEAD a document to get its title. 

- Brian

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 13:03:59 UTC