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

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran@hueniverse.com>wrote:

>
> If you don't want to register multiple 'up-n' relations, consider defining
> the relation type with an optional extension, such as:
>
> Link: <http://example.com>; rel="up"; level="2"
>
> And it would be better if the 'up' registration entry was more clear
> indicating it can indicate *any* parent, not just a direct parent. This way,
> a client always understand what the relation means, but can also support
> finer details with an extension.
>

That's an interesting idea - expanding on it:

Link: <http://example.com>; rel="ancestor"; gen[eration]="1"
>

Generation would be 1 for parents, 2 for grandparents, 3 for
great-grandparents etc.

Another thing I saw before - nobody mandates that ancestry information be
reflected in the URL path segments so the suggestion to "reverse engineer"
ancestors from the URL fails in my mind.

I don't see the harm in pre-populating a "Generic Link Relations" registry
with entries like this so as to give standards writers sensible direction -
otherwise we basically have to make do with whatever weird and wonderful
things people come up with (eg "up up up").

Sam