On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 19:42:20 +0100, Kyle Marvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This points out that the above rel+type don't carry sufficient semantic
meaning to help a UA decide what to do with them. I don't think anyone
on this thread is disagreeing with that. This discussion (as I
understand it) is about what to do given that ambiguity. You can
either get more specific with the rel value, with the content-type, or
with both.
The problem with baking the necessary information for this particular use
case inside the 'rel' value is that we possibly need a million different
'rel' values for a million diffierent use cases, or what we'll see is
semantic overloading where 'rel' values are abused to mean different
things in different use cases and that again will hurt interoperability.
Instead, we can let consumers define their own use cases upon the given
content type and not push our pre-defined use cases (in the form of 'rel'
values) down their throat because we're too reluctant to expand the MIME
type of atom with a 'type' attribute (or something similar). Are we
confident enough about Atom's entire spectre of use cases to say that
different 'rel' values are sufficient?
I think not. Give consumers the correct content type of the resource
instead, and they can themselves decide what to do with it, on the base of
a more general 'rel' value that don't dictate what they can and can't do
with it. 'rel' values are not sufficient to solve this issue imo. We need
something less fine-grained and more generic. We need to define this at
the HTTP level.
--
Asbjørn Ulsberg -=|=- http://virtuelvis.com/quark/
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»
