The 'profile' Link Relation Type
RFC 6906
Independent Submission E. Wilde
Request for Comments: 6906 EMC Corporation
Category: Informational March 2013
ISSN: 2070-1721
The 'profile' Link Relation Type
Abstract
This specification defines the 'profile' link relation type that
allows resource representations to indicate that they are following
one or more profiles. A profile is defined not to alter the
semantics of the resource representation itself, but to allow clients
to learn about additional semantics (constraints, conventions,
extensions) that are associated with the resource representation, in
addition to those defined by the media type and possibly other
mechanisms.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other
RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at
its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by
the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6906.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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RFC 6906 "profile" Link Type March 2013
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Terminology .....................................................3
3. Profiles ........................................................3
3.1. Profiles and Media Types ...................................4
3.2. Profile Context ............................................5
4. IANA Considerations .............................................5
5. Examples ........................................................6
5.1. hCard ......................................................6
5.2. Dublin Core ................................................6
5.3. Podcasts ...................................................7
6. Security Considerations .........................................7
7. Acknowledgements ................................................7
8. References ......................................................7
8.1. Normative References .......................................7
8.2. Informative References .....................................7
1. Introduction
One of the foundations of the Internet and web architecture is the
fact that resource representations communicated through protocols,
such as SMTP or HTTP, are labeled with a 'media type', which allows a
client to understand at run time what 'type' of resource
representation it is handling. Sometimes, it would be useful for
servers and clients to include additional information about the
nature of the resource. This would allow a client understanding this
additional information to react in a way specific to that
specialization of the resource, where the specialization can be about
constraints, conventions, extensions, or any other aspects that do
not alter the basic media type semantics. HTML 4 [HTML401] has such
a mechanism built into the language, which is the 'profile' attribute
of the 'head' element. However, this mechanism is specific to HTML
alone; at the time of writing, it seems as if HTML 5 will drop
support for this mechanism entirely.
RFC 5988 [RFC5988] "defines a framework for typed links that isn't
specific to a particular serialisation or application. It does so by
redefining the link relation registry established by Atom to have a
broader domain, and adding to it the relations that are defined by
HTML."
This specification registers a 'profile' link relation type according
to the rules of RFC 5988 [RFC5988]. Links with this relation type
can be used in representations that support typed links as well as in
HTTP Link headers. The profile link relation type is independent of
the context in which it is used and does not constrain, in any way,
the target of the linked URI. In fact, for the purpose of this
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