Linking instance documents and context documents (ISSUE-16)

On the last telecon we discussed ISSUE-16 [1] which is about adding a Link
header and/or a MIME type parameter to the spec to link from an instance
document to a context document or vice-versa out-of-band, i.e., without
having to use @context at all in the JSON document.

This would have a number of pros:

- smooth upgrade path
The only change you probably have to make is to add a few headers to your
JSON Web API which can be achieved without changing one line of code, think
.htaccess and mod_headers for instance

- clean and small instance documents
Removes all irrelevant stuff for non-JSON-LD developers

- external description of JSON documents
If we would implement the data=... MIME type parameter for context documents
it would allow developers to create context documents and to link to
instance documents which are not created by themselves, e.g. an item in
Facebook's Graph API. JSON 

- MIME type wouldn't have to be changed
If we have a link header we wouldn't need to change the MIME type of simple
JSON documents to application/ld+json. This might be important to not to
break existing systems.


There are also some concerns:

- Inaccessible
Not all people are able to access HTTP headers, this mostly applies to
browser-side JavaScript (but we have other issues there as well)

- Confusing
There are different places to put a context now.. difficult to know where to
look


Since we didn't came to a conclusion in the telecon, we decided to push it
back to the mailing list to have a broader discussion. Thoughts?



[1] https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld.org/issues/16

--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Sunday, 2 October 2011 21:06:28 UTC