System and method to monitor and transfer hyperlink presence

Abstract

Method to monitor and transfer hyperlink presence information, including: transmitting a hyperlink presence monitor request to a web server; receiving an hyperlink presence information; and rendering a hyperlink based upon the hyperlink presence information. Optionally, the hyperlink presence information is represented as one of: attributes of a hyperlink element; HTML5 microdata; RDFa data; and XHTML message data. Optionally, the hyperlink presence information includes: a last-update information to indicate when the hyperlink presence was last updated; a last-status information to indicate a latest hyperlink presence status; a monitor information to indicate a URI that points to a resource to monitor for hyperlink presence; a status-list information to indicate a list of hyperlink presence status values; and a target information to indicate the hyperlink to be monitored.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61 / 471,507, filed on Apr. 4, 2011, the content of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.BACKGROUND[0002]1. Field of the Invention[0003]Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to hyperlink presence. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to a system and method for monitoring presence information of a hyperlink, and rendering the presence information to a user.[0004]2. Description of the Related Art[0005]An architectural style that underlies the Web is REpresentational State Transfer (“REST”). A web service that is compatible with REST is said to be “RESTful.” REST provides resource management and promotes architectural choices that include: 1) Addressability—each resource can be addressed by Uniform Resource Identifier (“URI”); 2) Connectedness—resources are linked to provide navigations; 3) Uniform ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0021]An efficient approach to supporting these applications is to expose the fundamental functions on the phones as REST web services and make mobile phones as web service endpoints, so that services on mobile phones can be invoked and composed in different ways by different applications. This approach eliminates the need for each application to duplicate the same function. Making a phone into a web service endpoint enables the applications to interact with the phones in heterogeneous mobile environments, as web service is independent of transport protocols and programming languages. REST web service is easy to extend as it supports dynamic discovery through links. For example, to add a second camera on the phone into the services, we just need to implement a new camera resource and link it the main resource.

[0023]Embodiments in accordance with the present invention describe how Compact HTTP can be bound to multiple messaging protocols, in particular to XMPP and Short Message Service (“SMS”). These protocol bindings introduce asynchrony into REST to support event-driven REST web services on mobile phones. Furthermore, HTTP over XMPP in accordance with embodiments of the present invention introduces hyperlink presence into REST to mitigate the broken link issue that is important for mobile phones. Embodiments in accordance with the present invention also provide a security profile that is useful to afford flexible and quick setup of security contexts between services and clients.

[0024]Based on this protocol, embodiments in accordance with the present invention provide a lightweight web services framework on an Android mobile phone. Within this framework, a plurality of resources, including sound, camera, camcorder, location, power, motion, scheduler, and telephony manager are implemented as secured REST web services. The collaborative endpoint network framework also supports web storage (e.g., Google sites, YouTube, etc.) in order to upload recorded media for instant sharing and collaboration.

Problems solved by technology

However, this approach is not suitable for mobile environments, because mobile phones do not have reachable IP addresses.

However, modern smart phones rarely support WAP because they can interpret HTML directly.

However, when a hyperlink is broken, there is no way for a user of the hypertext system to know when it will be available again unless the user constantly polls it.

This polling process, similar to playing phone tag, is very inefficient and often leads to increased communication cost and time.

However, there is currently no mechanism to associate presence information with hyperlinks in distributed hypertext systems.

As a result, there is no efficient way for a user to keep track of the status of a resource pointed to by a hyperlink in real-time communication and collaboration over the Web.

However, the “Retry-After” header does not guarantee that the resource will be available by the suggested time.

Furthermore, the status codes and response headers are not available until the user agent requests it.

The combination of these two factors forces the user agent into an inefficient polling mode, when it should get the status in real-time.

However, XMPP protocol is not based on REST web services.

But these subscriptions are unidirectional and not web resources.

None of the research discussed above has studied how to provide presence information for hyperlinks.

First, the HTTP 1.1 messages can be complex and large, while some features of HTTP 1.1 are never used in mobile phones.

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