Re: Identifying a book on the Web today

>
> > * Using a URL that doesn’t identify the publication (e.g. an external
> HTML page) to help people indirectly locate a publication should be a
> feature that we provide by specifying some form of discovery mechanism
> (some form of link—HTTP header or link tag—with a format-specific rel value
> is the usual way of doing this).
>
> I am not sure I 100% understand what you mean here. I guess you refer to
> the (still undecided) issue of locating the WP's manifest (however it will
> look like) using a URL. If so then yes, I completely agree that we have to
> provide a discovery mechanism.
>
> But… alas! it is not easy to set up, at least for a lambda user, a proper
> HTTP based mechanism like, eg, content negotiations or controlling the
> return headers. This is also a constraint we will have to work with,
> content negotiation should probably be one but not _the_ mechanism to
> achieve that.
>
> (The difficulties to control those things is one of the reasons that the
> Web developers community often seems, these days, to reject any HTTP based
> mechanisms…)
>

I believe that Baldur is saying that to discover a Web Publication, you
don't have to visit one of its primary resource necessarily.

For example, you could browse a catalog and whenever you visit a specific
product/title page, it would be capable of discovering the publication.

For the discovery mechanism, the two most reliable methods are:
- the link element in HTML
- the Link header in HTTP

I fully agree that content negotiation and modifying HTTP headers won't
always be an option, which is why there's also an option to handle
discovery in HTML.

Hadrien