Re: 2NN Contents Of Related (303 Shortcut)

On 09/04/2014 01:50 PM, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On 2 September 2014 08:00, Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> wrote:
>> We could ask questions like "Is /Index?page=1 a representation of
>> /Index ?" and "What is the subject of the metadata in a 200+CL, the
>> effective request URI or the CL?" The end result of these is that we
>> evaluate the use cases for 303.
> I think that saying we end up re-evaluating the need for 303 is
> drawing a pretty long bow.
>
> Why don't we talk instead about semantics.  What semantic distinction
> are you looking to make?  There's a functional pattern you are looking
> to enable (request this, get that instead, don't pay extra round
> trips), but that pattern is supported by 200+CL.
>

It's a good question, and I'm not sure we have a great answer. Mostly, 
we want it to be possible for there to be semantic distinctions.   We're 
building infrastructure, not applications, so the distinctions are 
likely to be made at other layers.

Some possible distinctions that come to mind:

- search engines / indexing services -- these systems index which URLs 
provide content containing particular data items.   These systems are 
indexed by the URL; should they index the request URL or the CL?

- endorsement -- what we now see in social systems as Like/+1/star -- 
where the user sees something and gives it some kind of mark of 
approval.  Is that mark on just the first page of items, or the whole 
set?    Which URL should be considered endoresed?  It's possible the 
user will be frustrated, or worse, if they meant to mark one and the 
other was considered marked.

- link rel=alternate -- is that an alternate for this page or the whole 
thing?   Some alternates might be paged differently, so maybe it doesn't 
make sense for the page.

- link rel=copyright -- if the different items have different copyright, 
there might be multiple of these links to cover them all, and it will be 
different depending whether this is talking about the paged resource or 
just a page

- link rel=next/prev -- at first glance these obviously are about the CL 
not the requested resources, but what if the requested resource were 
itself in some kind of sequence?    Or what if the redirect were for 
some reason other than paging?

Again, I'm not claiming any of these are rock solid -- they're not 
applications I'm building right now -- we just think it's important that 
it remain possible to make these distinctions, and we don't see how 
200+CL does that.

      -- Sandro

Received on Thursday, 4 September 2014 22:02:57 UTC