Subject: Some suggestions for link relations (without an I-D to put them in)

From: Nicholas Shanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:30:08 +0000

The main purpose of this email is to test that I receive emails from
this list, as I haven't received any messages from it yet (having
subscribed in late May).

The secondary purpose is to suggest some link relations which don't
currently have a home. Perhaps someone can pick them up for their I-D?

"top" == the result of following a chain of "up" links until no more
"up" links are found.
"home" == the starting URL of a RESTful API. Useful to send as a
minimal resource instead of a 204 response. (think of the top-left
logo on a website, going to the site's "homepage")
"delete-form" == a link to a resource providing a form which can be
used to delete the context resource (basically, this is an "are you
sure?" dialog before the UA sends a DELETE). This is useful for web
apps.

If the site/API is entirely hierarchical, the first two could
conceivably point to the same URL. If the site has sub-sites (e.g.
geocities), then the home link may point to a sub-site home page,
which may itself have an "up" link. If the site/API is not
hierarchical, but has hierarchical subparts, then "top" could point
from some deep resource to a resource which is not "home", but is
linked to from the "home" resource. So I think the two are
sufficiently differentiated to suggest both.

Also, I think it would be useful to define a suffix, "-item" which can
be appended to any link relation which is defined as pointing to a
collection. The "foo-item" relation would point to the "item"
resources within that collection.

e.g. "archive" == "Refers to a collection of records, documents, or
other materials of historical interest."
ergo: "archive-item" is any of the "item" links from the resource that
would be obtained by following the "archive" link from the current
resource.

The goal here is to increase productivity by omitting unnecessary
steps (specially I am thinking of HTML pages, and not making users go
through an intermediary collection resource to get to items within
that collection).

Background: In my API I have a "client" resource, which contains a
link to a "sites" collection, the items of which represent a physical
address from which the client business operates. In the current
manifestation of our web app, users have to follow a /sites URI then
choose a site from the list. A new design intends to incorporate the
list of sites directly into the client resource, so a new link
relation is needed, e.g. "/site", or using my suggested model:
"/sites-item", in order to reduce the number of clicks required to
navigate around.

-- 
Nicholas.

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From: Erik Wilde <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:31:10 -0800

hello all.

> logo on a website, going to the site's "homepage")

maybe http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-json-home would be a 
good place to register such a relation? while the draft does define a 
specific media type (a JSON one, and 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wilde-home-xml registers a derived XML 
one), the registered relation easily could be (and of course should be, 
like every link relation) made independent of the target's media type.

cheers,

dret.

-- 
erik wilde | mailto:[email-masked]  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
            | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:44:03 -0800

Nicholas,

Writing up a quick I-D to register a few new link relations is fairly
painless. If you'd like to give it a shot, I could send you an empty
template later on today that you could use to start.

- James

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 2:30 AM, Nicholas Shanks
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> link-relations mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/link-relations

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From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 23:01:44 +0100

>template later on today that you could use to start.

Hmm http://web.archive.org/*/http://paramsr.us/link-relation-types/ I
thought we had something like that already, but apparently not there.
Oh, and the site no longer exists...
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email-masked] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

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From: mike amundsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:46:45 -0500

FWIW, of the suggested values you list:
"top"
"home"
"delete-form"
and the blanket "*-item"

i think "home" is useful and "delete-form" (while not one of my favorites)
would go nicely w/ the existing "create-form" and "edit-form" LRVs.

I think "top" is troublesome. i think the existing "first" covers use cases
i can think of (including the one you cite)

I am not a fan of creating a "compound" LRV or an LRV template people can
use to create their own, unregistered LRVs. Instead, I think using an
unique URL (per 5988) is a better approach.

mamund
+1.859.757.1449
skype: mca.amundsen
http://amundsen.com/blog/
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