On 05/09/2008 3:07 PM, James Holderness wrote:
>
> Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> In the Jabber community we've been looking at defining links to, say, a
>> chat room where a post could be discussed. Therefore we've been thinking
>> about defining rel="discuss". The value of such a link could point to an
>> XMPP-based or SIP-based groupchat room, an IRC channel, an email
>> discussion list, a web forum, or other such venue. Does this seem
>> reasonable?
>
> Do you have a specific use case in mind? I understand that you have a
> link that you want to publish, but you can already do that in Atom. For
> example a related link seems like a fairly good fit to me:
>
> <link rel="related" title="Discuss on IRC"
> href="irc://example.org/#atom" />
>
> The fact you've chosen not to use an existing link relation suggests
> that you expect a client to do something special with these "discuss"
> links. What did you have in mind? Why would a client need to be able to
> differentiate a "discuss" link from any other link type?
Those are good questions. I had not given sufficient thought to using
the "related" link. Perhaps that would work; however, from the
definition in RFC 4287 I would say that "related" is intended for static
resources that provide connected/associated information, such as
background data, additional content of interest, etc. At least that is
how I read RFC 4287:
2. The value "related" signifies that the IRI in the value of the
href attribute identifies a resource related to the resource
described by the containing element. For example, the feed for a
site that discusses the performance of the search engine at
"http://search.example.com"; might contain, as a child of
atom:feed:
<link rel="related" href="http://search.example.com/"/>
An identical link might appear as a child of any atom:entry whose
content contains a discussion of that same search engine.
Granted, the definition "identifies a resource related to the resource
described by the containing element" is somewhat circular, but it
doesn't quite capture what I had in mind for "discuss". I think a link
of type "discuss" would identify a venue where multiple people can
exchange messages about (i.e., engage in a discussion or conversation
about) the resource. Such a conversation could take place via email,
Internet Relay Chat, XMPP groupchat, MSRP groupchat, web forum, voice or
video conference, or whatever other technologies people come up with for
social interaction and discussion over the Internet. The use case is
that you don't just want to find related content, you want to actively
engage in a conversation about the topic. This is different from
"related" because a conversation happens at the link, and it is
different from "comments" because you're not following a feed of
comments on the entry but instead engaging in a conversation. So perhaps
"conversation" would be better than "discuss", but be that as it may I
think these use cases (multi-party interaction, not reading a static
resource or following comments made by others) are sufficiently
different to justify definition of a new link relation.
At this point I think I'll write an I-D about this idea and then we can
have something more concrete to, er, discuss. :)
Peter
--
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/
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