[uf-discuss] HTTP profile header proposal

Wed Jun 28 12:06:44 PDT 2006

On 6/24/06, Al Gilman <Alfred.S.Gilman at ieee.org> wrote:
> At 12:20 PM -0400 6/23/06, Chris Casciano wrote:
> >On Jun 23, 2006, at 11:58 AM, Scott Reynen wrote:
> >
> >>Via Danny Ayers' blog [1], Mark Nottingham's proposal to add
> >>profiles to HTTP headers seems very relevant to microformats:
> >>
> >>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-00.txt
> >>
> >>It would allow for HEAD requests to identify pages containing
> >>microformats without downloading the full document.
> >>
> >>Peace,
> >>Scott
> >>
> >>[1] http://dannyayers.com/2006/06/23/return-of-the-http

Thanks Scott, I agree this may well have utility around microformats.

[snip]

 Failing the ability to do just that, do you
> >ignore profile inclusion or just include all profiles all the time?
>
> You send it all the time.
>
> At least my impression at present is that if there is an @profile in
> the html:head then the author thought about it and cares about it.
> It's not that popular yet to be much mis-used. So it's worth sharing.
> Once it succeeds, of course, the road to bloat is clear.  Thank God
> for Moore's Law.

I agree.

> I think your problem is one of precision, not accuracy. Accuracy
> problems are what we have had trouble with concerning Content-Type:
> not being in line with the actual data in the entity body / resource
> representation. Here the header only gives a rough summary of what
> you want to know in more detail.

[snip]

> Once you decide that your filter expression for profiles is going
> to be heuristics, not science, there are reasonable results to be had.

But I'd note that the use of a profile (be it in header or <head>)
makes a huge leap towards science over scraping, far better to use a
URI than hunting for short key strings in attributes.

> [I speak as a fool.]

Ditto :-)

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com