WD-authlink-@@Date

Links for Web Authoring

W3C Working Draft @@Date

This version:: (unpublished)
$Id: WD-authlink.html,v 1.4 1996/12/09 03:09:32 jigsaw Exp $
Latest version:: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Authoring/WD-authlink
Editor:: Dan Connolly
Authors:

HFN

Status of this document

This is a W3C Working Draft for review by W3C members and other interested parties. It is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C Working Drafts as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress". A list of current W3C working drafts can be found at: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR.

This work is part of the W3C HTTP Activity, in particular distributed authoring and versioning.

Abstract

@@ways to request and supply links in HTTP headers for editing purposes.

Introduction

Access Control

Editing tools need to update more than just content of web pages; they need to allow the author to express auxiliary information such as access control, pricing, etc. This extension allows clients to discover the address of an access control resource; for example, a form that allows the author to set access control policies for a page.

The extension identifier is http://w3.org/HTTP/perm. A GET request including this extension indicates that the client is interested in access control information; in particular, links of type 'perms'.

If the response indicates participation in the extension, it must include a Link header of type 'perms' giving the address of the access control resource. For example:

GET /Products.html HTTP/1.1
Protocol: {http://w3.org/HTTP/perm }

200 OK
Protocol: {http://w3.org/HTTP/perm }
Vary: Protocol
Link: </cgi-bin/access-control?path=/Products.html>; rel=perms

<h1>Products</h1>
...

Getting the Source of Generated Resources

Many HTTP servers include content-generation features such as the NCSA 'server-side includes' feature, where the content of a resource is not copied directly from a file, but generated from it by some interpretation.

In this case, an editing tool may need the contents of the original file, rather than the generated content, for editing purposes.

This extension allows the server to export the source as a named resource, and relate it to the generated resource by a link.

GET /Products.html HTTP/1.1
Protocol: {http://w3.org/HTTP/source }

200 OK
Protocol: {http://w3.org/HTTP/source }
Link: <Products.shtml>; rel=source

<h1>Products</h1>
...

Variants

GET /fred/home HTTP/1.1
Accept-Language: fr

200 OK
Vary: Accept-Language
Etag: fr;960201T042356

<p>Je sui ...

This implies that when a server recieves a PUT request for a resource with multiple editable variants, it must be able to determine which variant to update based on the entity tag.