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

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 08:39:30AM +0200, Sam Johnston wrote:
> That's an interesting idea - expanding on it:
>
> Link: <http://example.com>; rel="ancestor"; gen[eration]="1"

Not sure if you intentionally changed it to "ancestor" here, but I certainly
wouldn't want to start mint a new relationship name when "up" already has some
modest use in the wild.

> 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 wasn't suggesting some new and wonderful technique here.

The "/" character has special meaning within a URI, as do "." and "..", and as
much as we like to tell ourselves that URIs are opaque, folk wisdom tells us
that we can usually treat them like UNIX filenames.

Power users "hack" URIs to navigate, and there are browser extension that
automate it for everyone else. My suggestion to base the depth information on
parsing the URI has some grounding in current practice.

Sure, you could be pedantic, and use UUIDs for all your URIs. And if you did, I
guess you'd have a bit of a problem trying to represent hierarchy depth in your
relations. How common is this though? And moreover, you could use the order of
the relation to indicate depth.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater

Received on Monday, 31 August 2009 06:59:49 UTC