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

Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
>>> As far as I can tell, Mozilla only supports one of each attribute. Are 
>>> there UAs that support more?
>> How did you test that?
> 
> http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/http/link/009.html
> 
> Opera also only supports one of each attribute.
> ...

The current two implementations are buggy anway. I don't think it makes 
sense to restrict the header syntax to what Mozilla and Opera came up 
with in terms of support.

It's clear that bug-fixing, test cases and more implementations are 
needed; if this occurs there's no reason to kill these bugs in Mozilla 
and Opera as well.

> ...
>>>> I'm concerned that this would disallow internationalisation of 
>>>> title, for example (e.g., you couldn't express both an english and a 
>>>> spanish title for a link).
>>> That sounds like one of those things that looks good on paper but 
>>> doesn't really ever translate to implementations. Are we really 
>>> expecting authors to provide multiple titles per link? How would that 
>>> work in UI?
>> I think Julian covered why it's necessary to have this.
> 
> Do you mean here?:
> 
>    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2009JulSep/0634.html
> 
> If so, I do not find his reasoning convincing.
 > ...

I didn't "reason", I just stated how to deal with this case in UAs: "The 
UI would select the language best suited for the user."

What part of this didn't convince you? Are you saying that UAs are 
incapable of matching language tags?

 > ...
> I think this basically makes the registry worthless. At least for HTML5, 
> there are several aspects that we need to have in a machine-readable 
> fashion for each link type, including:
> 
>  - whether the link type is allowed on <link>
>  - whether the link type is allowed on <a> and <area>
>  - whether the link type is a hyperlink or references an external resource
> 
> If the link registry isn't going to be providing this, then it's not 
> really solving the problems for which HTML5 needs a registry.
> ...

1) I note that HTML 5 doesn't have a proposal for this either.

2) What's the use case for this being machine-readable? Are you 
suggesting that implementations would look this up anytime they need it? 
  How is this supposed to scale?

 > ..
>> Take, for example, the "duplicate" relation type currently being 
>> discussed; while it's immediately useful for MetaLink, there are many 
>> other potential uses for it, and the client behaviour with each is 
>> potentially different.
> 
> What happens when it's defined one way for Atom, and another way for HTML, 
> and then each group wants to extend their processing to HTTP linking when 
> used with SVG?
> ...

Then having a single registry with a well-documented registration 
procedure will be useful (as opposed to a Wiki).

 > ...

BR, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 16 September 2009 10:31:58 UTC