- From: Erik Wilde via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2015 17:27:23 +0000
- To: public-annotation@w3.org
HTTP defines this as a MAY. therefore that's all that clients can expect in an HTTP world. expecting more leads to bad clients that break in an HTTP world because developers will take shortcuts and write code that incorrectly assumes that taking `Allow` as a promise is a reasonable thing to do. HTTP says that whatever methods a resource supports MAY be exposed via `Allow`, and that's enough. there is no way how clients can depend on this information anyway, they still have to be coded in a way that can deal with 405 responses. if you encourage clients to do something else, you encourage the development of broken clients. it's like @azaroth42 said, in theory the "protocol" could simply point to HTTP, and that's all that would be required. in practice, it can be helpful to have a document that explains everything in context, so that developers can understand which concepts of HTTP, which media types, and which additional aspects of the web they should take into account when dealing with the specific service. but that's really not more than a convenience, because in the end, all of the moving parts in the service need to be specified somewhere (media types including processing models and so forth), and putting those in context in a single document is simply helpful. as a side note: personally, i have started calling the media type the protocol, because it defines the ways in which peers have to process and understand data, and in which they can engage in protocol conversations (by following links). this is not entirely correct, because technically speaking, HTTP is the actual application protocol (and the only thing that is required to engage in successful individual interactions), but it is the protocol at a slightly higher level when it comes to conversations that go beyond single request/response interactions, and talking about how clients might want to achieve certain application goals. -- GitHub Notif of comment by dret See https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/51#issuecomment-120079220
Received on Thursday, 9 July 2015 17:27:24 UTC