Henry Story wrote:
On 1 Apr 2005, at 14:53, Eric Scheid wrote:
Prior art in other specs says the relationship is from where the link is found, and to the thing at @href.
I think we are agreeing here.
The link is from the representation "<entry>....</entry>" to the resource identified by the href. That is what proposal A says, I think.
Not for me...
Taking back Eric's example:
<entry>
...
<link rel="http://example.org/rels#next";
href="http://example.net/somethingelse.atom"; />
...
</entry>
My interpretation is that "...somethingelse.atom" is the next (entry or whatever is defined by the @rel value herein) from the point of view of the entry containing the link element.
If you replace the @rel with @rel="alternate", then "...somethingelse.atom" is an alternate representation of "me" ("me" being the entry carrying the link element).
If you want to say that the entry is an alternate representation of the thing at @href, then (re)introduce the rev attribute: @rev="alternate", meaning "I am an alternate representation of the thing at @href" where "I" is the entry carrying the link element.
One could also think of the @rel="alternate" as a bi-di relation: "we" (the entry carrying the link element and the thing at @href) are alternate representations of the same thing, without telling which is the "primary" representation (maybe neither of both is, maybe the primary representation does not have any IRI). This means that @rel="alternate" has the same meaning as @rev="alternate".
Well, finally, I'll go for the last... As we are looking at the relation from the point of view of the entry carrying the link element, it is clear that the thing at @href is an alternate representation of the entry that we know of, but it is not defined that the "primary" representation might be the entry nor that the thing at @href knows of the entry as an alternate representation of itself, whichever is the "primary" representation... Well, in a few words: they are alternate representations of the same thing.
Same goes for @rel="related": both things are related. This is told by the entry carrying the link element. The thing at @href might not know it is related to this entry. As for "alternate", @rel="related" has the same meaning as @rev="related".
This is because "alternate" and "related" don't define a direction to the relationship.
If you bring back the "next" relationship, it defines a direction which is read "from the entry carrying the link element to the thing at @href", it defines what is the thing at @href related to the entry: it is the "next".
In other words, with link elements, the entry says "hey, this is an alternate", or "hey, this is related", or "hey, this is the next". Here, I use "an" for alternate and related and "the" for next because *I* have defined the "next" relationship as being a one-to-one.
-- Thomas Broyer
