Magnets are cool; or, Yet another validator update

I’ve been reading the Magnet URI Spec , and the idea behind it’s pretty cool. It’s basically a way to connect documents on the Internet with services provided locally. In the case of the examples given on the website, many of them apply to P2P services. So if I find a song I love and want to share it with a friend, I can e-mail the magnet URI to her and clicking on it will open her P2P app. Cool.

Of course, ccValidator “just happens” to support magnets; if it sees something that looks like a Magnet URN, it constructs a magnet link from it. This leads me to my second point, that I’ve once again updated ccValidator . The changes and fixes are relatively few. Magnets are now constructed to also contain an optional dn, or Display Name, parameter. The display name is extracted from the dc:identifier tag in the work metadata. Also, the validator won’t barf now if it gets an error code when retrieving the URL (404, etc).

Have fun with it, and as always, feedback is welcome.