Re: HTTP 2.0 (was Re: Last Call: draft-nottingham-http-link-header (Web Linking) to Proposed Standard)

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Sam Johnston wrote:
> ...
> The link header could already make a huge difference to the way the web 
> works (I've already started on this with 
> draft-johnston-addressing-link-relations 
> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-johnston-addressing-link-relations>), 
> but we're lacking the LINK and UNLINK verbs that HTTP originally defined 
> for managing them. Similarly, people often run into problems using 
> PUT/POST for requests that should have been handled by PATCH (which was 
> also [poorly] specified and then abandoned). Encodings are yet another 
> issue I'm increasingly coming up against for non-ASCII characters. "HTTP 
 > ...

We don't need HTTP 2.0 to define LINK, UNLINK or PATCH (the latter being 
defined in draft-dusseault-http-patch-14 which is progressing REALLY 
slowly).

> as a meta-model" would also benefit from categories (which I have 
> already transplanted from Atom in draft-johnston-http-category-header 
> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-johnston-http-category-header>). Oh 
> and let's not forget about pulling in the MOVE and COPY verbs from 
> WebDAV so we can instruct servers to migrate resources (e.g. push a VM 
> from one cloud to another).

What stops you from doing this right now?

> ...
> Another significant pain point for me (and apparently others) is 
> collections. URLs should be able to return multiple resources headers 
> and all, without having to resort to add-ons like multipart MIME. That 
> way I could ask for, say, all of the contacts in my mail account and 
> have them rendered as vCard but with metadata like author and security 
> information, web linking to other contacts (eg FOAF), web categories, 
> etc. Presumably this would be relatively easy to do by tweaking the spec 
> (e.g. using CRLF separators between resources) but today I'm having to 
> use hacks like text/uri-list which have O(n+1) rather than O(1) 
> performance, or resorting to formats like Atom for this special case.
> ...

WebDAV (RFC4918) defines collections, and ways to get information about 
multiple resources at once.

> ...

BR, Julian