Datalink - a naive question...

[Norman Gray]

Paul and all, hello.

On 2014 Mar 14, at 09:47, Paul Harrison <paul.harrison at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

> I have a naive question - why is DataLink defined as a service rather than simply a specialised VOTable pattern with an associated mime type?

You might be interested in Section 3.5 of the VOTable spec, which was revised in revision 1.3.  This section talks about the <LINK> elements, and its content-role attribute, and this might provide the structure you're looking for here.

There were richer versions of this structure discussed on the mailing list, before 1.3 was standardised.  They were rejected at the time because there were no convincing use-cases supporting them.  The discussion took place in September--November 2013; see <http://www.ivoa.net/forum/votable/>

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK