Re: Link: relation registry and 303

On Jan 31, 2009, at 02:46, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> On 31/01/2009, at 11:00 AM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>
>> HTML5 can just assume they are aliases.
>
> They had a problem with that; i.e., they didn't want to have to  
> consider all of the following as equivalent;
>
> foo
> Foo
> FOO
> http://iana.org/whatever-the-registry-url-is/foo
> http://iana.ORG/whatever-the-registry-url-is/foo
> http://iana.org/whatever-the-registry-url-is/fOO
>
> and so on...
>
> I've always been a bit skeptical of this argument
[...]
> HTML5 folks, if we were to move back to using URIs for all link  
> relations, specifying that they need to be case-normalised before  
> comparison, would that work for you, and if not, why? Is the  
> implementation cost of case normalisation + resolving against a base  
> URI really that high? Is there something I'm missing here?

I'm not speaking for HTML5 folks in general--just for myself.

Requiring colonless rel tokens to expand to URI before comparison  
would not work for me, because allowing "http://iana.org/whatever-the-registry-url-is/stylesheet 
" and "stylesheet" as synonyms in future UAs would be gratuitously  
incompatible with existing UAs that look for "stylesheet" only.

In short, my opinion is what I said at TPAC: If people who want to  
mine HTML documents for data in order to put it into an RDF process  
want to see rel values through URI-tinted glasses, that's fine. They  
can check if the rel value contains a colon and if not prepend a fixed  
string. However, requiring everyone else to process rel values that  
way is not fine.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2009 09:20:37 UTC