Re: [draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06] concerns about Link header

But not all clients are browsers and not all representations are HTML
or XML.  As the basis of a discovery mechanism for scripting clients
and the like, I have found it to be ideal.  Perhaps there isn't a big
need to implement this in browers (TBH that's not for me to say), but
as far as I'm concerned the spec still does have value.  The
alternative is for me just to make up a header syntax of my own -
easily done but wasteful in the long run.  Even the discipline of
turning relationship identifiers into URIs has been of value,
resulting in an self-describing system that is completely transparent
and client-independent.

Mike
mjb@asplake.co.uk
http://positiveincline.com
http://twitter.com/asplake



2009/8/31 Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>:
> I should probably have expressed my doubts earlier, but I don't really have
> the feeling that implementing the Link header fully per specification is
> really worth all the effort. In fact, dropping the limited support we have
> seems like a more attractive option.
>
> Having a UI for the <link> element never really took of in the decade that
> it existed except for a few special values (which people are bitching about
> on this list; "alternate stylesheet" is one of the few minor success
> stories) and hoping that interest in implementing such a thing will revive
> if we re-introduce the Link header seems misguided. Making the Link header
> more complex than its counterparts by supporting localized titles also feels
> way too much like some nice theoretical idea that might be implemented
> correctly in a few clients but will hardly be used in practice. (It also
> stops it from being semantically equivalent to the HTML <link> element, but
> that is not stated. A bug?)
>
> And while obviously lots of thought went into the specification, the primary
> goal seems to be to getting it to RFC status rather than getting it
> implemented in clients. There are no test cases, almost no checking of
> existing applications, almost no requirements for clients in the draft.
>
> This is also not a feature Web authors are asking for as far as I know. (The
> implementation of the Link header in Opera was more done as a gimmick and in
> retrospect we should probably not have done it.)
>
>
> --
> Anne van Kesteren
> http://annevankesteren.nl/
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 31 August 2009 10:51:18 UTC