Subject: [core] use of /.well-known/core

From: Peter Bigot <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:59:15 -0600

A question has arisen regarding whether /.well-known/core is a namespace,
and what that means.  My understanding is that it is proposed to be a URI
path prefix to allow access to resources with standardized purposes related
to Constrained RESTful Environments.

The most conservative interpretation of /.well-known/core reserves the
unadorned prefix as the location for retrieving a list of (some of) the
resources hosted in the server.  The meaning of other URIs with the same
prefix are left up to the server.

In an aside, I'd proposed moving that to /.well-known/core/ld so that the
same prefix can be shared for other purposes.  Whether /.well-known/core/ld
itself is specified to define (implicitly) the meaning of URIs where it is a
prefix is a separate issue.  The major impact of this is that existing
implementations must recognize a slightly longer path as the entrypoint to
the resource list.

My opinion is there are a lot of other basic capabilities that are likely to
be standardized for CoRE-relevant environments now and in the future, and
keeping the option of putting them under /.well-known/core rather than
having to obtain new paths from IESG for each of them makes a lot of sense.
A standard set of resources related to network management and cross-vendor
building automation standard entry-points are two examples.

For extensibility, I think it should be treated as a namespace, with
specific extensions reserved for specific standardized roles.  One of those
roles might be /.well-known/core/vendor in which the server could do
whatever it wants, so as not to inhibit innovation and to allow prototyping
of proposed roles.

Peter