Re: anchor parameter - LC comment on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07.txt

On 28.02.2010 12:22, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> I think we're saying the same thing here, but your text seems to rely upon the reader to understand that it's underspecified purposefully (the "syntax they don't grok"), whereas I'd like to surface that in the document.

Not sure. The thing I didn't like in your proposal is that it sounds 
like somebody (who?) needs to do something special to make the anchor 
parameter work.

> I know it's a bit messy, but there *is* a concept of something that says "when you're using links for X, this is valid, this isn't."
>
> I.e., consumers don't just pick a number from /dev/random to determine whether or not they pay attention to links with anchor parameters; it's written down somewhere, based on what they're doing with the link.
>
> I hesitate to make this into a big deal, especially since we're so close (I think) to having this out the door, but letting clients make an arbitrary decision is horrible for interoperability. If I'm using a link header to tell a web browser where a stylesheet is, I should be able to expect that different implementations will behave the same way with regard to it.

I think we agree that a recipient can't ignore the anchor parameter, 
right? -- and that's what the two UA impls of the Link header currently do.

What the spec needs to say in some way is: "either process the anchor 
parameter, or ignore all links that contain it"

With respect to the stylesheet example: let's assume that I want to add 
an extension to my server that attaches stylesheet links to 404 response 
bodies (where the context resource is anonymous, as described in 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-08.html#rfc.section.6.1>). 
Let's further assume that the people who did specify "stylesheet" didn't 
think of this use case. How do I get that working later on, then?

Best regards, Julian

Received on Sunday, 28 February 2010 20:22:43 UTC