When you’re building Hypermedia-style services, you might have used the IANA link relation types list to find appropriate, generic keywords for your rel="" attributes.

This list is the official registry for relation types such as collection, next, canonical and others.

I had a need for adding a few generic relationship types for a generic hypermedia client, so I wrote a IETF draft to define them and get them added to this list.

The new relationship types I’m hoping to define are:

• authenticate - To find an endpoint where a client might authenticate, such as an OAuth2 login screen.
• authenticated-as - To find a resource associated with the user who is currently logged in. This is a sort of ‘who am I’ feature.
• logout - A link that can be followed to expire existing sessions.
• register-user - Which might be used to find for example a login form, or and API endpoint where new users can be created.

The full document can be read here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pot-authentication-link-01

If you think this is an interesting spec, or if you’ve already adopted this or something similar, your feedback on the IETF Art list would be very appreciated:

• Thread.
• List information.

You can also leave feedback, questions or suggestions on the Github project.