On Nov 9, 2004, at 5:45 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
I think it would be better if my name wasn't in the page title.
It won't go into the spec, our lengthy PaceWhatchamacallit tags are the equivalent of what W3C Working Groups call "Issue H27" and so on. Your name will not impinge on public consciousness past our Last Call. Until, of course, someone complains about the lameness of Atom's linking primitives, when of course we will blame it all on you.
It would be simpler to modify the proposal to just say that the attribute is either a URI or a token, where the token is equivalent to the URI obtained from appending the token to "http://www.iana.org/assignments/relations/";. In fact, I'll do that right now.
That's fine, except for the language about "interpreting the link the same way as it interprets generic metadata" adds no value, so, since we're whacking away at the Wiki, I'll replace that with a note that values of "rel=" impose no obligations on software behavior.
There are even valid arguments for not allowing any sort of extensibility beyond that of ignore-unknown-elements.
Indeed, except for we keep hearing assertions that in this particular area of linking elements, extensibility is golden. Plus, the cost is low.
Tim, you might want to consider taking all of the link and metadata proposals and organizing them as a ladder, with levels of extensibility being the rungs. Then get each person to indicate
I think you joined us late enough to have forgone the benefits of a couple of thousand messages on link extensibility, plus assorted surveys and polls. I think the WG understands each other on this now, and speaking as co-chair, I think that PaceFieldingLinks is pretty well as far as the WG is prepared to go.
the pure entertainment value of watching a group of professional and semi-professional writers try to reach consensus on a design
I think that form of entertainment is widely available across the IETF landscape. -Tim
