Re: HTTP Methods

An earlier implementation of URIQA used a specialized header.
It was messy at best. I don't have time at the moment to go
into all the details, but just wanted to note that it's been
tried and it was found to be unnacceptable.

Regards,

Patrick


On Feb 25, 2004, at 16:01, ext Joe Gregorio wrote:

>
> Patrick Stickler wrote:
>> On Feb 25, 2004, at 15:28, ext Jon Hanna wrote:
>>>
>>> Quoting Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Feb 25, 2004, at 12:40, ext Jon Hanna wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ... I remain unconvinced of the case
>>>>> for MGET.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Can you demonstrate how the equivalent behavior can be
>>>> implemented using the existing methods without resulting
>>>> in either (a) multiple requests for each single logical
>>>> operation or (b) unintended side effects in the case of
>>>> misunderstanding between client and server, or (c) efficient
>>>> and explicit failure if the request is not understood?
>>>
>>>
>>> I'll qualify "unconvinced" as meaning "I've only looked at this a 
>>> tiny bit, and
>>> it didn't convince me" as opposed to "I've looked at this a lot and 
>>> I think
>>> it's wrong". It's an uninformed instinct thing.
>>>
>>> That said, and given that URIQA is on my list of stuff I want to 
>>> look at in the
>>> near future (but I've been putting it off until after my current 
>>> paying
>>> project) why not GET application/rdf+xml rather than MGETting?
>> What if the resource denoted by the URI has an RDF/XML representation
>> yet you don't want the representation of the resource, you want its
>> description.
>> Content negotation is about selecting between representations.
>> While it might be possible to make it work for differentiating
>> between representations and descriptions, it precludes the ability
>> to select between different encodings of a description and also
>> (even if a special MIME type is used for descriptions) does not
>> make it possible to ask for descriptions of descriptions as opposed
>> to a representation of the description itself.
>
> How about a custom HTTP header with a URI of
> the description? That does require two
> request/response transactions, first to get
> the custom header and then a second one
> on the designated description URI, but that is
> mitigated by the fact that you can just do a HEAD for the first 
> request.
>
> 	-joe
>
> -- 
> http://BitWorking.org
> http://WellFormedWeb.org
>
>

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 09:29:54 UTC