Re: Is 303 really necessary?

Hi Norman,

On Sat, 2010-11-06 at 22:45 +0000, Norman Gray wrote:
[ . . . ]
> I take it that Ian is suggesting resolving the ambiguity he has
> created, and thus the need for any heuristics, by extending the notion
> of IR in such a way that a URI with a 200 response *is* an IR,
> *unless* dereferencing it returns RDF which (authoritatively) declares
> that the URI is a NIR.

I don't think that is feasible.  After all, what's so special about RDF?
And how would the client even know whether RDF were returned?  Almost
any serialization can be turned into RDF.  Suppose XML is returned.  Is
that RDF?  A GRDDL transformation can cause it to be viewed as RDF?  And
what about a plain HTML page?  Surely in that case the URI would
identify the web page.  But what if there were some RDFa tags embedded?
Suddenly it *doesn't* identify the web page?  Even if the client ignores
those tags?

No, I think it makes more sense to acknowledge that the ambiguity *has*
been created by the server both returning the 200 response and sending a
document saying that the URI identifies a toucan, but applications that
are troubled by this ambiguity should use the provenance of the
information to decide bits of information to use or ignore -- in this
case ignoring the information given in the HTTP response code in favor
of the information given in the RDF document.



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 14:40:31 UTC