- From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2011 10:37:39 -0500
- To: nathan@webr3.org
- Cc: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
But if you look at RFC 5988, most of the relations seem to be *resource* relations, not representation relations. The introduction speaks of "relationships between resources"; also "links between resources need not be format specific; it can be useful to have typed links that are independent of their serialisation, especially when a resource has representations in multiple formats." So it's a bit confusing to say that Link: is an entity-header (which, I admit, 5988 does). I guess a "next" Link: on a 404 response would tell you what the next resource is after one that the representation carried in the 404 response is a representation of, not the next one after the requested resource (which may still exist somewhere). This rules out one application I really wanted to use Link: for, which is to use it with a 301 or 302 response to give information about the resource identified by the URI. You could call this a "value-added redirect". With this interpretation it would refer to some resource of which the entity in the redirect response was a representation - a very different beast. Oh well! Jonathan On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote: > Roy T. Fielding wrote: >> >> On Feb 1, 2011, at 11:50 AM, Nathan wrote: >>> >>> Julian Reschke wrote: >>>> >>>> On 12.10.2010 01:02, Nathan wrote: >>>>> >>>>> I'm looking for a quick bit of guidance on whether the Link header >>>>> would >>>>> class as representation metadata >>>> >>>> The Link header spec says "entity header", which is the terminology we >>>> used in HTTPbis until draft 10; so I think it's supposed to fall into the >>>> same class as "Content-Language", for example. >>> >>> Sorry but I need to come back to this one, can I get a definitive answer >>> (please :)) on whether the Link header is representation metadata (like >>> Content-Type), or not? >> >> It is sometimes metadata. Some of those times it is representation >> metadata, like Content-Type, whereas in other times it can be >> resource metadata, like Vary. >> >> And occasionally it is just part of the representation, though that >> tends to confuse people who think data == body and headers == meta. >> >> What the link is for depends entirely on the rel value. > > Thanks Roy, that's exactly the answer I was hoping for! > > Best, > > Nathan > >
Received on Sunday, 6 March 2011 15:38:11 UTC