RE: What would break, a question for implementors? (was Re: Is 303 really necessary?)

Hi Nathan

I'm not saying you're wrong - but could you explain why it would be a pain for FOAF terms to return 200?  Which kinds of application are dereferencing those terms and relying on a 303 response?

eg  http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person currently 303s to http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

What would break if http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person returned that same content with a status code of 200?

Just trying to understand the issue

Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: public-lod-request@w3.org on behalf of Nathan
Sent: Fri 11/5/2010 12:45 PM
To: Robert Fuller
Cc: Leigh Dodds; Michael Hausenblas; Ian Davis; Linked Data community
Subject: Re: What would break, a question for implementors? (was Re: Is 303   really necessary?)
 
Robert Fuller wrote:
> However... with regard to publishing ontologies, we could expect 
> additional overhead if same content is delivered on retrieving different 
> Resources for example http://example.com/schema/latitude and 
> http://example.com/schema/longitude . In such a case ETag could be used 
> to suggest the contents are identical, but not sure that is a practical 
> solution. I expect that without 303 it will be more difficult in 
> particular to publish and process ontologies.

Good point which needs discussed more, for instance FOAF returning 200 
OK's would be a real PITA and even worse than the 303 pattern, 3**s are 
definitely advisable in this case.

ps: introducing some form of ETag equality wouldn't be the best idea, it 
may be possible to use Content-Location and ETag together to cache and 
save doing the second request after a 303 though.

Best,

Nathan