Re: [dxwg] A short token to specify a profile may be used as long as there is a discoverable mapping from it to the profile's identifying URI [ID5] (5.5) (#290)

> client may or may not know the token or what it means

That puts us in trouble for creating and assessing such a mapping.

The current proposal I've seen is:

```
Link: <http://example.org/resource/a.profx.ttl>; rel="self"; type="text/turtle"; profile="urn:example:profile:x;token=px",
  <http://example.org/resource/a.profy.ttl>; rel="alternate"; type="text/turtle"; profile="http://example.org/profile/2;token=py",
  <http://example.org/resource/a.profx.xml>; rel="alternate"; type="application/xml"; profile="urn:example:profile:x;token=px",
  <http://example.org/resource/a.profy.xml>; rel="alternate"; type="application/xml"; profile="http://example.org/profile/2;token=py",
  <http://example.org/resource/a.html>; rel="alternate"; type="text/html"
```

However, this approach is useless for clients that don't know the token.

So I'm afraid we'll need better constraints. The minimum that I can imagine (but help me if I'm wrong) is that the client knows the token, but this begs the question (as I wrote above) why you wouldn't give it the URI in the first place.

> * it allows us to characterize existing systems that use a token to identify a profile

But this is a case where the client _knows_ the token, right?

> * It makes for clarity when a human finds links that specify a particular profile to access

But one would presume such links to be in human format, e.g., HTML with a link? People today also don't guess the content type from a URL.

> * it allows us to provide a pathway towards use of URIs as dereferencable identifiers

You mean the "token" is a URI then? But then it's just the general case, i.e., not a token at all.

In any case, none of the above 3 cases showcase a "agent does not know token" situation.

> I find @RubenVerborgh 's arguments against tokens to be quite sensible.

Thanks @kcoyle, but I was not even arguing yet :-) This is me honestly trying to understand how a mapping mechanism would work, and what prior knowledge we can assume in clients that want to use it. (And indeed, given some configurations of that prior knowledge, why we have tokens altogether.)

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Received on Wednesday, 28 August 2019 18:04:42 UTC