Nikunj Mehta wrote:
For the purposes of read-only usage, what we have with link
relations is good enough for identifying semantics. You follow a
link and issue a GET request and boom.. you get what you asked for.
but how do you find a link? for atom and atompub, the link can be
identified because of the element/attribute, but links are only
findable because of the fixed media type. what i was suggesting (and
why i said it is a bit off-topic) was a generic way to discover
links in resources, regardless of the media type (my current
thinking is that this should work for all XML media types, or more
specifically, probably just those XML media types which are
namespace compliant).
http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/2009/06/link-discovery-for-xml.html
I suspect that this is heading towards XLink.
The IANA link registry is a good enough place to hold this
information, although it may be made even more easy to manage than
to write to iana-assign for a new assignment. Whether that is a
Wiki or something else, that could be discussed.
i agree that IANA is good for the link relations, if people want to
standardize them (i would assume that the vast majority of RESTful
services don't want to register their link relations, though, and
they should not be required to do so).
And certainly they are not required to do so. People that do not want
to standardize relations can use URIs.
Oracle is certainly interested in putting together some kind of
adjectives on Atom resources so that we can better predict the kind
of operations that can be performed. For example, the edit and edit-
media relations actually mean something beyond other link relations
because I can actually manipulate those resources.
the above blog post is a very early draft. my current thinking is
that LDX should allow link discovery, and discovered links should be
described by an optional link relation, an optional URI template, an
optional media type, and optional methods. this way, RESTful
services could expose as much information as required about what to
expect when traversing links.
Of these, the media type is already part of the link element. List of
methods can be described as part of the semantics of the link
relation. There was a talk about link-templates in the past to address
URI templates. But given that, URI template is still is not solid,
links with URI templates may have to wait a bit longer.
Subbu
