- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 13:44:12 -0800
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 11:26:24AM -0800, Tim Bray wrote: > >6. Where content negotiation is used, it should only be used to > >negotiate between documents which really are equivalent - they > >basically say the same thing in a different language. For > >example, it would not be appropriate to give and RDF schema and > >XML schema for a namespace because they really contain different > >information, and a machine or human would be fooled into thinking > >it knew the import of a document, when really it had been given > >something different. > > Good catch. I had envisioned people saying "get me a schema" > and saying whether they wanted XSD or Relax or DTDs via > content-negotiation. I guess that would be unsound. -Tim I'd be interested to hear TBL's (and maybe MarkB's; think resource modeling ;) response to this; it seems a little closer to a (somewhat fuzzy) line. jpg vs. gif is clearly appropriate for conneg; I don't think many would dispute text/plain vs. text/html (in most cases). What about jpg vs. gif vs. SVG? I agree that there's a clear distinction between RDF Schema and XML Schema; I'm less sure that there is between XSD, Relax and DTD. I think the overriding principle, from a URI perspective, is to give each thing that needs identity a URI. One can do conneg when there are a number of roughly equivalent (in information contained). These are somewhat orthoganal; one can do conneg and have only one URI, one can do conneg as well as have many URIs for the different representations, and one can just have a bunch of URIs. Back to the immediate subject, though, using a directory format is basically doing agent-driven negoatiation anyway. -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/
Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 16:44:13 UTC