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

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>wrote:

> Sam Johnston wrote:
>
>> ...
>> For example, I was looking for a relation to describe the "most recent
>> version" of a resource (as distinct from a specific version in a VCS). I'd
>> have used "current" were it not for its definition in RFC 5005 as "a feed
>> document containing the most recent entries in the feed" (for which 'recent'
>> would have been a better term IMO). Now I need to either try to shift the
>> existing definition or find another like 'latest' - without regard to the
>> registry we'd have ended up with two conflicting definitions.
>> ...
>>
>
> <
> http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-brown-versioning-link-relations-latest.html
> >
>

Thanks Julian - glad to see progress being made on this front. It doesn't
solve my main grievance (that being URL shorteners eroding the web at an
increasingly rapid rate) but it does deal with some useful use cases...
here's hoping browser back buttons morph into 4-way joysticks before long
and who doesn't think browsing versioned web pages with a time machine style
interface would be cool? :)

While we're at it here's some feedback for the authors (copied):

   - 'version-history' could safely be shortened to 'history' (and should
   IMO)
   - 'latest-version' could become 'latest' or the existing 'current' could
   be commandeered if the existing definition is deemed close enough.
   - 'working-copy' seems a little too specific and I'm not sure I grok the
   use case(s)... perhaps something like 'local' or 'replica' would be better?
   - 'predecessor-version' should be 'prev-version' in line with HTML's
   definition of 'prev' and RFC 5005's definition of 'prev-archive' - may as
   well keep the link relations coherent.
   - 'successor-version' should similarly be 'next-version'.

A word on 'prev' vs 'previous': HTML 4
defines<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links>'prev' but
concedes that some UAs accept 'previous' as a synonym while HTML
5 effectively obsoletes
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/history.html#linkTypes>'previous' by not
mentioning it. RFC 5005 further confuses things by
defining <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005#section-3> 'previous' only to
go on and define
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005#section-4>'prev-archive'. Which is
it? draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06 currently
expresses no preference but it arguably should as servers should send one or
the other even if clients accept both.

Sam