[OAI-implementers] OAI-PMH baseURL discovery

[Tansley, Robert]

Lots of news sites use <link> to inform browsers etc. of an RSS feed,
e.g. news.bbc.co.uk, slashdot.org, theregister.co.uk, and the
Mozilla/Firefox browsers use this to allow 'live bookmarks'.  I'm sure
other tools use them too.

E.g. <link
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss0
91.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="rss" />

This established practice seems pretty consistent with what we're trying
to do.  I could easily envisage an OAI-PMH Firefox extension that does
something with this...

 Robert Tansley / Digital Media Systems Programme / HP Labs
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Robert_Tansley/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: oai-implementers-bounces at openarchives.org 
> [mailto:oai-implementers-bounces at openarchives.org] On Behalf 
> Of Andy Powell
> Sent: 14 February 2005 15:48
> To: Michael Nelson
> Cc: OAI Implementors
> Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] OAI-PMH baseURL discovery
> 
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Michael Nelson wrote:
> 
> > > I disagree with your implied preference for using <meta> 
> rather than
> > > <link>.  In this case, we clearly want to provide a link 
> to another
> > > resource - therefore the semantics of the <link> tag are much more
> > > appropriate than the semantics of the <meta> tag.
> > >
> > > I also suspect that your suggested use of
> > >
> > > OAIPMHbaseURL="..."
> > >
> > > and
> > >
> > > OAIPMHrecord="..."
> > >
> > > break the (X)HTML specs (though I haven't checked)?
> >
> > you are correct -- they do.
> >
> > re: meta vs. link...  We don't have a strong opinion either 
> way, but I did
> > see this:
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-xhtml2-20040722/mod-meta.html#sec_20.5.
> >
> > "This element defines a link. Link conveys relationship 
> information that
> > may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., 
> a tool-bar with
> > a drop-down menu of links)."
> >
> > I know <link> is not in common use, but it appears like the 
> intention is
> > to promote it to interactive user status?  If so, wouldn't 
> that be the
> > wrong thing to do with a (for example) GetRecord request?
> 
> Possibly, though I note that the same document also says this 
> in section
> 20.2.2
> 
>  Note that just because we are using URIs as unique 
> identifiers doesn't
>  mean that navigating to this URI with a web browser would 
> yield anything
>  useful.
> 
> which doesn't seem entirely compatible with the section you 
> quote from!
> 
> Remember that this document is about XHTML 2.0, which is not 
> finalised.
> 
> On the other hand, section 5.19 of
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/
> 
> (which I think is the appropriate W3C recommendation) says
> 
>  The Link Module defines an element that can be used to 
> define links to
>  external resources. These resources are often used to 
> augment the user
>  agent's ability to process the associated XHTML document.
> 
> which doesn't (to me) imply that the browser should 
> necessarily expect to
> display the <link> to the end user (i.e. "augment" could mean other
> things).  In our case, the 'user agent' is a Web robot, which is being
> 'augmented in its ability to process the document' by being 
> pointed to the
> OAI repository (or specific OAI record)  associated with the page.
> 
> Having said that, I know that some browsers do display all 
> <link> tags to
> the end-user in some form (e.g. Lynx and Opera I think).  This has
> resulted in a couple of negative comments about one of the DCMI
> recommendations ("Encoding DC metadata in (X)HTML meta and link
> elements").  Dublin Core recommends using a <link> tag to provide the
> namespace URI associated with the "DC." prefix used in <meta> 
> tags like
> 
> <meta name="DC.title" content="blah" />
> 
> and I know that a couple of people have complained that their browsers
> show them the namespace URI as though it is a clickable link :-(
> 
> All in all I'm not sure what is best.  I think that the semantics of
> <link> are appropriate, but given some browser behaviour it 
> may be more
> sensible to use <meta>.
> 
> Andy
> --
> Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell/      +44 1225 383933
> Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
> 
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