Fwd: "Is 303 Really Necessary?"

Y'all have probably seen before the below message from November; I
just wanted to get it into the awwsw archives.

Of course I'm in complete agreement with Tim. IR is a red herring,
what matters is what conclusions we draw from the 'is a representation
of' relationship.

I think Tim may have thought my question was critical of httpRange-14.
Rather it was incredulous. I was asking a question about the
conversation, not attempting to participate in it. I was surprised no
one came forward to explain why they like httpRange-14.

Jonathan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
Date: Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: "Is 303 Really Necessary?"
To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
Cc: Ian Davis <lists@iandavis.com>, nathan@webr3.org, Yves Lafon
<ylafon@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org

On 2010-11 -05, at 12:04, Jonathan Rees wrote:
> For 303, the question is whether anyone defended the prohibition on
> 2xx when the referent is not an "information resource".
>
> Jonathan

I am convinced that that argument is not the relevant
one and leads to people trying to define Information Resource
from first principles, which is a terrible angles and pins

I find it more useful to think about the question of
what the relationship is between the thin the URI identifies
and the stuff returned -- and that is that it is the content of the thing
identified by the URI.

To people can niggle about "Well, a person can be a
message because they can have a tattoo of a poem on them"
and instead of arguing whether a person can
be an information resource, you just make sure that
whoever seves the person up on a web server serves
up their contents  (here in the argument has to be the poem)
if you server 200.   It isn't what they are. 200 gives the relationship
between them and the stuff in the body.

So if you want to give information *about* th person,
by this new system you would do 303 or 208, the latter
meaning "Here comes stuff you may find interesting *about* what you
asked about".

Tim

Received on Monday, 24 January 2011 14:51:16 UTC