Subject: Removing references from link relations registry?

From: Sam Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:51:50 +0200

Mark,
There appears to be a consensus about link relations being generic and
independent of implementations on the basis that the namespace (english
language) is extremely sparse, there are alternative mechanisms for
identifying implementations (URI relations, content types) and generally to
avoid duplication of every relation for every type.

That being the case the definitions should be relatively concise, generic
and in plain english - ideally derived from dictionary definitions so as to
avoid repurposing words. They should also not be dependent on external
resources, particularly where multiple references (e.g. Atom and HTML)
define the same terms.

Accordingly please find attached a patch to
draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06.xml<http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06.xml>which
removes references from the registry. In the alternative perhaps you
would consider renaming the field to "Informative Reference(s)", though
references to implementations "in the wild" would perhaps be better stored
in a wiki like the WHAT WG
RelExtensions<http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions>page.

Sam