Re: Is 303 really necessary?

Nathan,

On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 17:51 +0000, Nathan wrote:
> Ian Davis wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
> > night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
> > redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
> > with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
> > the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
> > 
> > http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
> 
> Ian,
> 
> Please, don't.
> 
> 303 is a PITA, and it has detrimental affects across the board from 
> network load through to server admin. Likewise #frag URIs have there own 
> set of PITA features (although they are nicer on the network and servers).
> 
> However, and very critically (if you can get more critical than 
> critical!), both of these patterns / constraints are here to ensure that 
>   different things have different names, and without that distinction 
> our data is junk.
> 

Our data is already junk. What part of that seems unclear? 

See:

http://www.mkbergman.com/925/ontotext-sd-form-strategic-partnership/

For an unbiased assessment.

> This goes beyond your and my personal opinions, or those of anybody 
> here, the constraints are there so that in X months time when 
> "multi-corp" trawls the web, analyses it and releases billions of 
> statements saying like { </foo> :hasFormat "x"; sioc:about 
> dbpedia:Whatever } about each doc on the web, that all of those 
> statements are said about documents, and not about you or I, or anything 
> else real, that they are said about the right "thing", the correct name 
> is used.
> 
> And this is critically important, to ensure that in X years time when 
> somebody downloads the RDF of 2010 in a big *TB sized archive and 
> considers the graph of RDF triples, in order to make sense of some parts 
> of it for something important, that the data they have isn't just 
> unreasonable junk.
> 

Sorry, it is already junk. Remember? The failure to distinguish between
addresses in an address space and identifiers is mistake that keeps on
giving.

Fix the mistake and all the cruft that is trying to cover over the
mistake will be unnecessary.

Our data may still be junk in that case but for different reasons. ;-)

<snip>

> 
> But, for whatever reasons, we've made our choices, each has pro's and 
> cons, and we have to live with them - different things have different 
> name, and the giant global graph is usable. Please, keep it that way.
> 

The problem is that you want *other* people to live with your choices.
Given the lack of adoption for some of them, those other people are
making other choices. 

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 18:09:59 UTC