Re: anchor parameter, was: Last Call: draft-nottingham-http-link-header (Web Linking) to Proposed Standard

On Sun, 2 Aug 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > ...
> > Unless there are really strong use cases, I think that the anchor= attribute
> > should be dropped. In practice, implementations today ignore that attribute,
> > which would mean that, e.g., a rel=stylesheet;anchor=a link would fail to
> > have the "right" effect. If it is kept, then the right behaviour for how
> > this should integrate with style sheet linking should be defined in great
> > detail.
> 
> Could you please elaborate what the "right" effect is, and how current 
> implementations fail for that?

Well unless I'm mistaken, if we have a resource A that has:

   Link: <B>; rel=stylesheet; anchor=C

...then that means we have a link:

   C - stylesheet - B

...which means that applying the style sheet to A would be wrong. Yet that 
is what UAs that support Link: would presumably do.


> It appears to me that anchor is not relevant for every single link 
> relation, but that doesn't mean it's not useful at all.

I don't see how it can't be relevant... if the link relation is between 
two resources, then acting as if it was a relationship between others 
seems wrong.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 09:05:20 UTC