Re: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

Quoting Graham <dtcd@mac.com>:

> 
> Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> > It is *not* a good idea to confuse a reference to a resource with
> > instructions as to what to do with it.
> > ...
> > The fact that you might want to poll a living document to see how it
> > changes and the type of data in the document are really orthoganal, and
> > should be kept that way in the protocol and the UI.
> 
> Then surely the problem here is the architecture of links themselves? 
> The problem being that they only serve as pointers to a resource, they 
> give no clue as to what to do with it. As you say, how to use a 
> resource is independent of its document format, and of its location. In 
> most cases, having a default action for a combination of type and 
> location has been more than adequate. But there is sometimes a need to 
> change the default action clicking a link produces - a example of this 
> already in use is links that specify they are to be opened in new 
> windows. This all sounds like something you might have discussed 
> before, though.
> 
HTML links have also some degree of metadata in the hreflang and type 
attributes, while they don't go so far as to say what one should do with a 
link, they do hint at what one could do.

XLink's multi-namespace mechanism could feasibly allow all sorts of metadata to 
be attached to a link.

Received on Wednesday, 10 December 2003 05:46:54 UTC