Re: Discovering service descriptions

Hi Greg,

there is no reason that the content returned by OPTIONS should not also
be accessible by GET elsewhere; the HTTP header Content-Location would
help here. In this way, OPTIONS on the service endpoint would be a clear
machine-oriented way of discovering service descriptions; for
human-oriented ways, a link from the endpoint's documentation or query
form (with conneg for HTML) or whatever should be good.

What do you think?
Jacek


On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 02:08 -0400, Gregory Williams wrote:
> On Aug 11, 2009, at 2:01 AM, Steve Harris wrote:
> 
> > On 11 Aug 2009, at 06:03, Gregory Williams wrote:
> >
> >> I'm still worried about HTTP OPTIONS not having a lot of support in  
> >> some client libraries. It also (I believe) make it difficult to get  
> >> at a service description with a web browser for visual inspection.  
> >> Do any browsers provide a way to make OPTIONS requests (I know curl  
> >> allows this)?
> >
> > Certainly Firefox and Safari do. I don't have any others to test on,  
> > but a quick google suggests that IE and Chrome support it too. See http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/
> 
> Hmmm... I was hoping for something that didn't involve javascript  
> (hence "visual inspection"). I'd like to be able to glance over what's  
> in a service description without having to resort to programming. I  
> suppose the conneg option might help here, but in general I suspect  
> conneg for html would return just a query form, not an html-formatted  
> version of the service description.
> 
> .greg
> 
>

Received on Monday, 17 August 2009 14:11:06 UTC