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

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:50:33AM +0100, Mike Burrows wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Firefox prefetching uses it:
>
>  https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ
>
> The Semantic Web crowd promotes it:
>
>  http://esw.w3.org/topic/LinkHeader
>
> TimBL has recommended this to me as a way of linking RDF to resources.
>

...or to skip RDF and link resources directly to one another.

Another production application I somehow managed to forget before is
rel=shortlink <http://purl.org/net/shortlink>, which allows a webmaster to
mint their own short links (e.g. for space constrained applications like
microblogging and SMS or pretty much anywhere humans need to transcribe URLs
- TV, radio and print). Clients (e.g. Twitter applications) can then pick
these up with HTTP HEAD requests which saves downloading and parsing the
entire HTML page. Not only is linkrot all but eliminated but the links are
higher quality/less opaque (eg http://microsoft.com/win7 rather than
http://tinyurl.com/decafbad) and therefore more secure, plus as everyone's
using the same one things like visited link colouring still works.

With wordpress.com jumping on board (and wordpress.org soon to follow suit)
there's already around 115m pages advertising these links.

Sam