Re: Dereferencing HTTP URIs (redux?)

Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
>> Pat Hayes:
>>     
>>> Seen in this way, the 303 is not so much a 'signal' to the 
>>>       
>> requesting agent that the resource in question is, or might be, a
>> non-information resource - a signal which seems arbitrary, ad-hoc and
>> potentially confusing - but rather simply as an acknowledgement of
>> the fact that a non-information resource cannot *possibly*, by virtue
>> of its very nature, return a direct response to a GET request.
>>     
>
> May I offer a slight correction?  In the case of a non-IR, it cannot
> return a direct response to the GET request.  But as Alan points out,
> the resource could in fact be *any* resource -- even an IR.  So the 303
> response is not necessarily because the resource *cannot* return a
> direct response to the GET request.  It may return a 303 because it
> *chooses* not to return a direct response -- perhaps because the
> returned representation would have to be huge, for example.
>
>
>   
Quite. I did not mean to imply otherwise. I think perhaps we are 
thinking from different ends of the GET process, as it were. The 
original sender has no idea what kind of resource he may be trying to 
ping; but the receiver of the GET *does* know, and it is that end's 
problem I was meaning to draw attention to.

Pat