Change Proposal 005

[Martin Atkins]

Lukas Leander Rosenstock wrote:
> Martin Atkins wrote:
> 
>> Hmm. Now that I think about it, isn't there an HTTP header "Link" which
>> is supposed to be equivalent in functionality to the HTML LINK element?
>>
> If we look for what others are doing, maybe take a look at the Pingback
> specification which is something different but the first part of it is
> also about auto-discovery of information about a specific resource.
> There they say:
> 
>    Pingback-enabled resources MUST NOT use the HTTP Link header for
>    advertising pingback servers. HTTP Link headers require non-trivial
>    parsing, and were therefore deemed too heavy-duty for the purposes
>    of pingback server autodiscovery.
>    http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0
> 
> We could agree on this, too.
> Regards,
> Lukas
> 

However, we're already requiring relying parties to parse (in some
sense, anyway) HTML, which is a lot less trivial than the HTTP Link
header. Meanwhile, by using it we get the benefits that apply to the
HTML LINK attribute, namely that a later version of YADIS could switch
to a different format (changing the MIME type) while allowing existing
users to advertise documents in both formats. It's also more consistant
with what we're plonking into the HTML.