Re: Input on request for link relation

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

>
> On 11/09/2009, at 11:17 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
>
>  One nitpick about the process is that it seems a request can be denied
>> with a suggestion for another relation (for example we might prefer to use
>> something like "push" or "notif[y|ier|ication|ications" rather than "hub"
>> for this one) but then that would require restarting the process where it
>> should proceed to registration immediately if the change is accepted by the
>> applicant.
>>
>
> Yes, but is the overhead really that onerous?


Perhaps not, and there could well be some delay in acceptance if committees
are involved. My worry is that if we don't streamline our processes as much
as possible (see Ian's suggestion about IANA maintaining a
RelExtensions<http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions>style wiki)
then people will do as they please anyway - see rel="hub",
rev="canonical", etc.


>  I also question the relevance of the "reference" field in the registry as
>> this links relations to implementations which I think we agree is a bad
>> thing - the registry should capture all the necessary semantics without
>> reliance on external references. It may be interesting to list zero or more
>> implementations of the relation (that is, make the "reference" field
>> optional as well and allow others to add themselves to it), however I'm not
>> sure the maintenance load is worth the effort.
>>
>
> Not to implementations, to the source documents for the registrations
> (which IANA likes to see in registries, AIUI, for paper trail etc).
>

Would it be possible then to support multiple references so that people can
see at a glance that a given relation is implemented as described in
multiple formats (rather than just the first format that happened to
register it)? May well not be worth the maintenance effort.


> It's true that the pre-populated entries have a lot of references to
> formats, but that's an artefact of history, not the direction we'll move in
> going forward.


That being the case would it be worth proactively populating the registry
with common/obvious relations with a view to avoiding e.g. this "monitor" vs
"hub" duplication (which is presumably burnt into various implementations on
both sides)?

I'm specifically thinking here about a thread from a few months ago in which
we discussed different types of references to resources, with a view to
getting relations like 'canonical', 'latest', 'permalink' and 'shortlink'
into the registry. Perhaps a separate I-D is the best way to achieve this,

Sam