Re: Proposal to register rel="about"

["Erling Wegger Linde" <erlingwl@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 9:03 PM, James Holderness <j4_james@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Erling Wegger Linde wrote:
>>
>> It would be extremely useful
>> for a client to know that the summary of the Atom entry is actuall the
>> summary property of an issue e.g. <link rel="about"
>> href="http://issuetracker/project1/issue1";>. You could not embed the
>> represenation found at http://issuetracker/project1/issue1 in the
>> entry using <content src="http://issuetracker/project1/issue1";> as
>> this probably would be hard for a non-human client to parse.
>
> Can you explain how a non-human client would find this:
>
> <content src="xxx" />
>
> harder to parse than this:
>
> <link rel="about" href="xxx" />
>
> I don't get it.

If the representation of an issue is (X)HTML with Javascript, CSS ++ I
think you must agree that it would be hard for a non-human client to
make sense of it? My point is that you cannot always use the existing
representation of the resource you are referring to if you want a
machine-client to understand/make sense of it. Sometimes you might
want to provide an XML, or even better, RDF representation (wrapping)
of that original resource (for instance an issue in an issuetracker).
If you have to create yet another resource (e.g.
http://rdfwrapper/project1/issues1) and then use <content
src=http://rdfwrapper..";> to link it in, I think that would be an
unneccessary, complexing (is that a word?) step which would make
AtomPub harder to use for many scenarios.

If you could use <link rel="about" href="htmlrepresentationofissue">
together with for instance <content type="application/rdf+xml">RDF
represenation here..</content> I think that would be a very powerful
addition to AtomPub. Without the <link rel="about"> you wouldn't know
(in a generic way) that the contents of the <content> element is
metadata about the original issue/resource. Even harder would it be to
understand that the <summary type="text/plain">Issue summary</summar>
element of the Atom entry would be metadata about the issue.

Best regards,
Erling

>
> Regards
> James
>
>