Unresolvable URIs (in Atom link relations)

[Davis_Cornelia@emc.com]

Hi Julian, all,

 

In your weekend post you make the point that

 

“it also needs to be clear

that we have a URI for the link target. (Note that that URI doesn't

necessarily need to be resolvable.)”

 

While I, of course, understand that URIs are not URLs (that is, they needn’t be resolvable), and that the value of an Atom link relation href is an URI (really an IRI), does the description of, for example, the “service” relation given here (http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml)

 

‘rel="service" indicates a URI that can be used to retrieve an Atom Publishing Protocol Service Document as defined by RFC 5023.’  (emphasis added by me)

 

not add the requirement of resolvability to these URIs?  This is one specific example, and the Atom specs do similar things – talk about URIs used as addresses.

 

I understand that there will be uses of atom link relations where the URI is NOT resolvable, for example, a URI value that represents me, and that there is always the possibility that at any instance in time, a URL may be not be resolvable.  The question is whether we can spec relations where the href value really is a URL?

 

Cornelia

 

Cornelia Davis

Senior Technologist

EMC Corporation, Office of the CTO
davis_cornelia@emc.com
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