New HTTP Link Header and Site Meta Specs

There are two specs being circulated at IETF that may be of interest to
this community.

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The first could enable the expression of RDF triples in HTTP via the
Link: header.

Semantics in HTTP Link Header
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07

This is useful for representations that can't encode RDFa, such as
text/plain or audio/mpeg MIME types:

Request:
   GET /TheBook/chapter3.txt HTTP/1.1
Response:
   HTTP/1.0 200 OK
   Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2012 23:59:59 GMT
   Content-Type: text/plain
   Link: </TheBook/chapter2.txt>;
         rel="previous"; title*=UTF-8'de'letztes%20Kapitel,
         </TheBook/chapter4.txt>;
         rel="next"; title*=UTF-8'de'n%c3%a4chstes%20Kapitel

I don't think that RDFa could use it directly, but there might be others
on this list that can think of a way that it could.

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The .well-known proposal, while it has mixed reviews, attempts to
migrate well-known URLs such as /robots.txt and /favicon.ico to a
.well-known directory on the server.

Site metadata in .well-known:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-site-meta-05

RDFa could build on this proposal in a couple of different ways.

For the RDFa Vocabularies discussion, for instance, we could define a
.well-known file like so:

http://example.org/.well-known/prefixes

The prefixes resource would have prefixes defined for the entire domain
such that an RDFa Processor could try that URL to get a list of
prefixes. This has some pretty obvious and nasty drawbacks, but may
inspire someone else to come up with a way to use these new URLs with
relation to RDFa.

None of these seem very persuasive to me at the moment, but they may be
persuasive to others, and they certainly warrant discussion.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarming Goes Open Source
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/02/01/bitmunk-payswarming/

Received on Wednesday, 24 February 2010 15:49:40 UTC