On Feb 27, 2006, at 8:29 AM, M. David Peterson wrote:
When you say "what it was designed for" can you be specific as to
what that definition is?
Well, we failed to gain consensus on that. Some of us wanted it to
be used only for links intended to be traversed by the user (like the
<a> element in HTML with an href attribute--the link is there so that
the user can click it and get to the linked resource). Others didn't
want this limitation, but wanted the link to be resolvable (eg., no
tag: URIs). Others wanted to be able to stick any URI in it. So
there is no tightly defined "what it was designed for".
I'm just saying that if an extra attribute is required to
disambiguate what's being pointed to in a case like the following
(without requiring the link target to be loaded and inspected), then
maybe you're trying to make this one element do too much:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.org/atom-2-rss-2.0.xsl"; />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.org/atom-2-rss-1.0.xsl"; />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.org/atom-2-fooml.xsl"; />
etc.
If one were to encounter such a list of links at the top of an Atom
document, which should one use? Should one download all of them and
then pick one? Or are you going to add an attribute something like
this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.org/atom-2-rss-2.0.xsl";
ext:targettype="application/xml+rss" />
Sorry, new to the conversation, but I have particular interest in
this topic as it is my belief that the URI/IRI can be used to imply
a lot of information that is otherwise hidden from view, or uses
more complex mechanisms to achieve the same result. If there is
real concern as to this approach, it would be great to gain a
greater understanding as what they are such that I can apply this
to the work I am doing in this area.
For a particular example of what I mean, please see this post >
http://www.xsltblog.com/archives/2006/02/what_rest_gets_1.html <
Hmm. If I'm reading that right, I wouldn't want to organize my
websites that way. And unless the specification for the "stylesheet"
link relation were to mandate that URIs be constructed in a way
enables readers to tell from the local path what type the stylesheet
is going to transform the feed to, you wouldn't have any way to know
whether you could apply such an interpretation in any given case. I
don't really see the benefit of putting the information into the URI
versus creating an attribute whose sole purpose is to specify the
type. The number of bits it would save is trivial, and it would
require the extra step of parsing the URI's local path to pull
information out of it that could be taken more easily from a
dedicated attribute.
Antone
