David Nesting wrote:
I expect that many of my implementations will utilize content negotiation (using the same URL as an HTML representation, where needed), so I expect that I'll have some links like:
<link rel="alternate" href="/" type="application/atom+xml"> <link rel="alternate" href="/" type="application/rss+xml">
Or even
<link rel="alternate" href="" type="application/atom+xml"> <link rel="alternate" href="" type="application/rss+xml">
That won't work, because content negotiation will continue to return the same thing it returned just now. You must somehow tell the server to return a specific other version of the current document, and you do that typically by sending a GET request with a different URL -- one that specifies a particular version of the resource.
As crazy as that looks, is there a better way of saying "this URL is also available in these media types"?
File extensions that encode file format in the URL are harmful when the goal is to "return the content in an appropriate format", which may change over time or with UA. If you're asking for a document in a *specific* format, then that a specifier for that format should be part of the URL.
~fantasai
