content negotiation in BP doc

Hi folks,
I was just looking at the BP about content negotiation.
It says "It is recommended to use content negotiation for serving data 
available in multiple formats." It then talks about having structured 
data within HTML and serving such pages by using content negotiation. I 
have two concerns. First, for a web page with mixed content, I don't 
think there is a content type that applies. If you are putting turtle or 
json-ld into html, then the content type would still be text/html, 
wouldn't it? If the intention is to suggest that people avoid mixing and 
instead serve the json in a json representation and the turtle in a 
turtle representation, that would work, but unless you are talking about 
doing this in an API, it would be really hard for most people to reach 
the alternative representations via content negotiation.

Secondly, even in the context of APIs, I think there is too much 
disagreement among web developers to say that using content negotiation 
is a clear best practice. You can also specify a representation in the 
request URI (foo/file.json, foo/file.ttl), which has the advantage of 
enabling sharing through the URI alone.

I would support a best practice that tells people to move different 
non-API representations of data to individual files and serve those 
under different URIs.
-Annette

-- 
Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2016 19:52:02 UTC