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Subject: Re: Request to register "identifier" relation type
From: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <54CA5E71-F469-4FD9-AF29-21985B454CAE@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2017 07:59:58 -0400
Cc: Peter Williams <pezra@barelyenough.org>,
 Geoffrey Bilder <gbilder@crossref.org>, Michael Nelson <mln@cs.odu.edu>,
 Simeon Warner <simeon.warner@cornell.edu>, "John A. Kunze" <jak@ucop.edu>,
 link-relations <link-relations@ietf.org>
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To: Herbert Van de Sompel <hvdsomp@gmail.com>
Archived-At: <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/link-relations/uzDmAklrJgdI2O7QzZFNSlchvVA>
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> On Aug 5, 2017, at 3:38 AM, Herbert Van de Sompel <hvdsomp@gmail.com> =
wrote:
>=20
> The answer is in the I-D and in a blog post that is referenced in the =
I-D. Please have a look.=20

I think a crisp one or two sentence reply to Peter's question ought to =
be possible. He rightly points out that the shared use of 'preferred' by =
your I-D and canonical could cause some confusion for web publishers. It =
also begs the question of preferred *for what*.

The core issue with canonical seems to be less a matter of semantics and =
more a practical matter of web publishers not wanting to assign a =
canonical or bookmark link to another domain (e.g. dx.doi.org) because =
of uncertainty about what this would mean for their Google juice. There =
is an SEO infrastructure built up around canonical, which has led to it =
being used quite a bit.

I wonder if rather than adding another link relation to the mix if the =
HTML folks would be willing to update rel=3Dbookmark to allow for usage =
with <link> which ought to make it amenable to use in an HTTP header as =
some other HTML relations are (e.g. alternate). The semantics of =
bookmark speak directly to the issue of persistence that your I-D seems =
to be addressing.

Also, while the name 'identifier' is elegant in some ways, I find it a =
bit hard to swallow since all link targets are technically identifiers.

//Ed=