- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:31:10 -0500
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)" <dbooth@hp.com>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, "T.VR" <"aman raman"@google.com>, "seb@serialseb.com" <seb@serialseb.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, "kidehen@openlinksw.com" <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, "tthibodeau@openlinksw.com" <tthibodeau@openlinksw.com>
On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 16:16 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg wrote: > > On Jul 31, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote: > >> > > I think serving the JSON is the best option. Serving HTML from / > > resource.json would defeat the purpose of having a JSON-specific > > URI. It is quite likely that the user pasted the JSON URI into a > > browser to test it, and *wants* to see the JSON that is returned. > > Everyone knows how to paste a URI into a browser; few know how to > > configure their browsers to specify their desired MIME types. > > I don't see how the best option is to ignore the accept header. If > the accept header says to accept only html then you shouldn't respond > with a different mime type as if that was an appropriate response. > The 406 or 30x responses make more sense. > > It's like saying, in a negotiation, that it's a fine thing to ignore > other negotiator and do what you want. Its not much of a negotiation > in that case. Well, yes, but keep in mind the premise: /resource.json (a JSON specific URI) i.e. the provider/server doesn't offer to negotiate types for /resource.json . Meanwhile, the HTTP spec seems to prefer 406 in this case: "If an Accept header field is present, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the combined Accept field value, then the server SHOULD send a 406 (not acceptable) response." -- http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.1 I thought there was some language a la "regardless of what clients say in the Accept: header, they need to be prepared for other media types to come back" but I don't see it in there. Maybe a 406 response could be helpful at least to humans if it said: Did you mean <a href="/resource.html">the HTML version?</a>. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
Received on Thursday, 31 July 2008 20:30:37 UTC