Site metadata; my preference

Wow, step away from your email for a few hours, and whammo ...

My preference would be for an optional response header, "Metadata" or
some such, returned via GET and HEAD.

I don't like MGET for the reasons explained in the TAG finding on
"URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET";

  "Safe operations (read, query, view, ask, lookup, etc.) on HTTP
   resources SHOULD be implemented using GET because that allows the
   result documents to be identified by URI, while using POST does not."
    -- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/get7#principles-summary

I don't like GET+Meta because I feel it violates a good practice
suggestion of Webarch;

  "Consistent representations: It is confusing and costly when, for a
   given URI, representations vary in unpredictable ways."
    -- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#pr-rep-ambiguity

And moreover, if representations were to vary in the way that GET+Meta
requires, that suggests to me that we're dealing with two resources, not
one.  Hence my preference for the response header solution, which uses
two URIs.

Thanks.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 2003 12:01:29 UTC