[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo and Scooby URLs

[Brian Moseley]

On 6/21/06, Lisa Dusseault <lisa at osafoundation.org> wrote:

> There is more prior art on this kind of problem than you can imagine,
> and no usable and robust solution has emerged.  Until OSAF gains the
> ability to seriously change browser extensibility paradigms, we're
> limited to the same kind of hacks other people have used.  We can
> offer a list of URLs somewhere (in email or on a Web page) and some
> annotations on those URLs.  A user-readable annotation for each URL
> is required (e.g. "this URL is for CalDAV applications").  A machine-
> readable annotation on each URL is a nice gesture of hope for
> improvement but mostly useless today.

this turns out to be another argument for merging cosmo and scooby.

imagine that the fancy scooby web interface is what you get when you
go to the "canonical" url for a collection. the html page can play a
similar role to the atom publishing protocol's collection
introspection document - it provides clickable links to alternate
protocols and formats as well as alt links in the html head. now it's
both machine and human processable.

this is probably much like what ppd were envisioning when they asked
for the redirect feature in the first place. i don't have any problem
with this approach. i just have a problem with configuring cosmo to by
default redirect to a completely different app that may or may not
actually exist :)