James M Snell wrote:
What is the type of the resource pointed to by the in-reply-to href? It
It's whatever type the server says it is when you GET it (Content-Type
header).
Well ideally you wouldn't want to GET or HEAD every href in order to
determine its type. I'm not positive this is a problem, but it may be
depending on what a client may want to do with this extension.
The related link allows clients that are not familiar with the Feed Thread
extension to at least be able to indicate that there is some kind of
relationship between the two resources.
Imagine that a client doesn't know anything about this extension. What do
you think such a client would typically do with related links? I don't know
about anyone else, but what I do is display them in a "see also" list that
the user can launch in a browser window. This works very well when the links
are to web pages or other resources that can be handled usefully by a
browser, but it's a complete waste of time if the link is pointing to an
Atom feed. Most of the time the user will just get a page of meaningless
XML - at best they'll get the option to subscribe to a feed that they're
quite likely already subscribed to.
But that's just how I handle links. Maybe there's a better way. Can you
imagine some other way in which clients might handle related links (without
knowing anything about this extension) that would be able to do something
useful with a link that pointed to an Atom feed - specifically the Atom feed
that the current message is replying to?
Now if the in-reply-to href was pointing to a web page I could understand
recommending a related link that pointed there too. So maybe you could limit
the recommendation like that. Or otherwise just leave out the recommendation
altogether and let the feed producer decide whether a related link is a good
idea or not. Related links are already part of the Atom spec - there's
nothing stopping a feed producer using them - but I'm not sure they should
be encouraged to do so with links which may not be at all appropriate.
Regards
James
