Connecting records, web pages and apps

[essentialrandom.bsky.social]

I published the discussion about changing to at:alternate and tagged everyone who mentioned it in their replies. You can find it here:

Renaming `at:alternate` metadata to align semantics with `rel=`

Continuing the discussion from Connecting records, web pages and apps. As I mentioned: Thread reactions There seemed broad support in the original thread for fixing this, so I collected what people said: There is also this comment by @snarfed.org… …which confirms our misuse of alternate and adds: Each Link in url with "rel": "alternate" or "rel": "canonical" is called a proxy link. Any Object with one or more proxy links is called a proxy object. The referent of a proxy link is called …

For this thread, seems like we’re overall converging on “something” that:

• tool builders always know where to find
• can link back to the page (and thus validate the relationships)

Proposals

• @snarfed.org proposed a sidecar record
• I proposed having a special namespaced field inside the record itself

@essentialrandom.bsky.social

{
 // a record, any type...
 // ...record data....
  "community.lexicon.meta.refs": {
    canonical: [....],
    alternates: [ "https://...."]
  }
 // ....
 // ...more record data...
}

I’m proposing the latter because:

• sidecar records have (at least now) poor discoverability—that is, if you don’t know that a sidecar record of that type is an established pattern, there’s no easy way to discover it
• sidecar records are hard to find across different lexicons: you can’t use the AtURI of the record as recordKey and there’s no way for it to uniquely identify a record across namespaces. This means that to find The One™, you’d need to enumerate the whole records space.

Conversely, if we put this data in the record itself, it’s always there to find and serendipitously stumble upon. If we’re worried that the record would then grow too big in size, we could always allow an AtUri as a possible link to the meta record.

FYI, variations of this have been discussed in the past (and keeps popping up), but they have yet to be adopted. We could be trailblazers here