Re: Site metadata; my preference

Mark Baker wrote,
> 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

I don't think it does violate that principle: the representations vary 
in an entirely predictable way as a result of cooperation between the 
client and server. As far as representations go, this isn't 
significantly different from vanilla content negotiation.

> 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.

We _are_ talking about two resources ... that's the whole point. The 
Meta: request header and Meta-Location: response header are acting as 
disambiguators: between a resource and a related metadata resource.

Cheers,


Miles