RE: "Hash URIs" and content negotiation

Hi Dan,

> This is the oldest and least rewarding discussion in the SW community!

au contraire :) it might be old but there are certainly still rewards to be had from this conversation imo. surely if we want other (less-semantic web-oriented) developers out there to take up these approaches and get it right, it's important that we're clear ourselves about what the best practices and techniques are? (or at least the relative merits of different approaches).

perhaps your response has answered the question and we can move on (stopping first to document the "right" approach somewhere), but in general lets not be afraid to ask the questions.

I've posed the question "when should I use hash vs slash URIs?" on the semanticebfaq.com wiki - answers/contributions encouraged! <http://www.semanticwebfaq.com/index.php?title=When_should_I_use_hash_vs_slash_URIs%3F> 

Cheers,

Tom :)

-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org on behalf of Dan Brickley
Sent: Tue 07/11/2006 3:50 PM
To: Richard Cyganiak
Cc: Semantic Web
Subject: Re: "Hash URIs" and content negotiation
 

Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> One good practice for identifying non-document resources is to use "hash 
> URIs" like http://example/john#me, and to serve a description at the URI 
> obtained by taking the part before the hash, e.g. http://example/john.
> 
> Now let's say I want to serve both RDF and HTML descriptions of John. 
> That is, both formats should be available from http://example.org/john, 
> depending on the request's Accept: header. How to do this?
> 
> a) Just return the requested type of content right at 
> http://example.org/john
> 
> b) Redirect to two different URLs, depending on the requested type, e.g. 
> http://example.org/john.html and http://example.org/john.rdf
> 
> I notice that the SWBP Vocabulary Recipes [1] suggest b). I have a hunch 
> that a) is problematic because it's a bit ambiguous, 
> http://example.org/john#me could refer either to John, or to an anchor 
> within an HTML page, if there's no 303 redirect in between. So, is only 
> b) allowed, or is a) fine too?
> 
> Comments?

This is the oldest and least rewarding discussion in the SW community!

You're very right of course, it's problematic to conneg in context of 
such URIs. This is why I always preferred slash URIs! Ah well...

I guess we're in a
"Doctor doctor, it hurts when I poke my finger in my eye" situation 
here? Sometimes conneg is best avoided...

cheers,

Dan

> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/#recipe3
>

Received on Tuesday, 7 November 2006 20:24:34 UTC