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Re: rel="discuss"


Aristotle Pagaltzis a écrit :

* Sylvain Hellegouarch <sh@xxxxxxxxxx> [2008-05-10 17:50]:

I am asking what would be gained by having

    <link rel="conversation" href="xmpp://foo"
        label="Chat about foo" />

that it could not just as readily infer from

    <link rel="related" href="xmpp://foo"
        label="Chat about foo" />

seeing as the critical bit of information for the machine
seems to be conveyed by the `xmpp:` part in both cases and the
critical bit of information for the user would be conveyed by
the label in both cases.

It seems to me that having to parse the URI to decide whether
or not such a link is usable by the program reading it is
fairly poor design decision.

From a machine POV, how would you differentiate those:

<link rel="related" href="xmpp://foo"
        label="Chat about foo" />

<link rel="related" href="xmpp://bar"
        label="Monitor bar" />


Do you actually need to differentiate them? If you’re merely
going turn these links into buttons for the user to click, with
the `label` as the label, then I don’t see any need for the
machine to be able to tell them apart.


The second might not even interest the user per-se, it might
just be targetted at auto discovery or what have you.


Yes, well, then the second link (but not the first, funnily
enough) needs a more specific link relation so to facilitate
autodiscovery by automatic agents because that one is intended to
be processed automatically. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.



I do not deny it. But it's a bit of a circular discussion here. You say:

"if it's a link targeted at human usage then related is good enough"
"if it's a link targeted at machines then a specialized rel value may arguably be needed".
Well in that case, a rel="discuss" is not an issue at all if you want autodiscovery by machines to work. 

Therefore in a web page you might want to have both:

<link rel="related" href="xmpp://foo"
        label="Chat about foo" />
<link rel="discuss" href="xmpp://foo"
        label="Chat about foo" />
One that common web browsers/feed reader will quite likely understand and the other one for automated web user-agents.
The thing is Peter may have conflatten both into the second option but I'd say he was actually seeking best practices advice when asking his original question. You gave him that and that's great.
I do believe in the end denying the need for a specialized rel attribute for this use case (whatever its value is) could be harmful for what the XMPP community has in mind overall. I'd say it's one of those bridges between the two communities. I've appreciated your patience and clarification in this matter BTW. 

- Sylvain