Re: HTTPbis and GET+303

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

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> Jonathan Rees writes:
>
> > The main problem I see is "A 303 response to a GET request indicates
> > that the requested resource does not have a representation of its own
> > that can be transferred by the server over HTTP." which directly
> > contradicts the httpRange-14 resolution.
>
> Doesn't contradict it as far as I can tell. Â It would perhaps be
> better if it said "the server does not have a representation for the
> requested resource that can be transferred. . .", but that doesn't
> change the condition, just makes its server-depenence clearer.
>


It implies that all resources are the sorts of things that *can* "have
representations of their own". And if resource means *anything*, then there
is a contradiction because there are things for which it makes no sense that
*they* can possibly have anything about *themselves* that have to do with
representations. Like potatoes.

-Alan



>
> > Suppose I have an ontology that defines some number of URIs
> > (i.e. tells you, as best it can, what they should refer to). The
> > URIs are not hash URIs. Now I am deploying a server for those
> > URIs. The TAG tells me that I can use 303, but HTTPbis tells me I
> > can only do a 303 if the server doesn't have a representation of the
> > referred-to resource. How on earth am I, the server administrator,
> > supposed to decide that question for every resource?
>
> Simply determine whether if you _didn't_ give a 303, would your normal
> URI->representation mapping give a result or not.
>
> > I have to do a cross product: For each representation that I have,
> > and for each resource in the ontology, is the representation a
> > representation of that resource?
>
> Reading the proposed text that way seems sea-lawyerish in the
> extreme. Would you be happier if the same text as is used in 8.4.5
> *404 Not Found* was used, i.e.
>
>  303 response to a GET request indicates that the server has not
>   found anything matching the request-target.
>
> ?
>
> ht
> - --
>      Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>                        Half-time member of W3C Team
>     10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>               Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
>                      URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
> [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged
> spam]
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