Link Fingerprints

Posted Aug 24, 2007 13:26 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: Google Summer of Code: Mozilla Projects

I wonder if the link fingerprints concept might get a better reception if the hash
information were moved to another attribute of the HTML <a> tag.
So instead of this:
<a href="http://mirror.com/file#hash(sha256:abc123)">
we'd write this:
<a href="http://mirror.com/file" hash="sha256:abc123">

It would lose some of the functionality (harder to pass around links with intrinsic
hash information, but would still be useful.

Link Fingerprints

Posted Aug 24, 2007 16:33 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree 100%. IMO, best would be, as you say, to pass the hash in a separate attribute. Second best would be to put it in the query (http://mirror.com/file?sha256=abc123). But, changing the meaning of the fragment? That's just silly!

Let's say I want to send someone to a specific section, sec2, in a page on a remote site. Let's say further that I need to verify that the page is *exactly* what I was expecting.

<a href="http://mirror.com/a.html#sec2" hash="sha256:abc123"> -- attribute works
<a href="http://mirror.com/a.html?hash=sha256:abc123#sec2"> -- query works
<a href="http://mirror.com/a.html#sec2hash=sha256:abc123"> -- fragment fails!

Let's hope they give this some more thought...

Link Fingerprints

Posted Aug 24, 2007 16:47 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Hmm, I don't like putting it in the query string, since that's considered reserved
for processing by the server. The other two are explicitly for client-side
processing.

Link Fingerprints

Posted Aug 26, 2007 18:43 UTC (Sun) by JohnNilsson (guest, #41242) [Link] (1 responses)

Why not just add a new scheme type for hash based data identifires

hash:[<hashtype>:]<hashcode>[@<uri>]

where @<uri> identifies a way to fetch the resource. If it is omitted the client could instead query any DHT.

Link Fingerprints

Posted Aug 26, 2007 22:50 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Because that's not backward compatible. A browser that doesn't know how to check the hash won't be able to open the link.