Re: URI policy for thesaurus concepts

Thomas Bandholtz writes:

> Dan: 
> > That doesn't necessarily follow. HTTP supports content negotiation
> > (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/
> > ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt) which allows multiple
> > representations of the same thing to be made accessible via a
> > common URI.
> 
> I found http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec12.html:
> "Server-driven negotiation has disadvantages:
>       1. It is impossible for the server to accurately determine what
>          might be "best" for any given user, since that would require
>          complete knowledge of both the capabilities of the user agent
>          and the intended use for the response (e.g., does the user 
>          want to view it on screen or print it on paper?)."
> 
> IMHO we only could think about server-driven negotiation here.
> This does not sound very encouraging ...

Server-side negotiation can be very effective in combination with the
Accept headers.

For example:

    GET /foaf/0.1/ HTTP/1.1
    Host: xmlns.com
    Accept: text/html

returns a description of FOAF in HTML, while

    GET /foaf/0.1/ HTTP/1.1
    Host: xmlns.com
    Accept: application/rdf+xml

returns a schema in RDF/XML.
-- 
David Menendez <zednenem@psualum.com> <http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>