Conditioning

Hi all,

I'm really struggling with something, which I can only call 
"conditioning", if you remember recently there was a proposal to 
leverage Content-Location so that one could GET 200 OK on slash URIs, 
tonight I went back to look at that again, wrote a big reply then had 
to stop myself.

Content-Location:
   For a GET or HEAD request, this is an indication that the effective
   request URI identifies a resource that is subject to content
   negotiation and the representation selected for this response can
   also be found at the identified URI.

I did it again, I read that as:

   For a GET or HEAD request, this is an indication that the effective
   request URI identifies a resource that is subject to content
   negotiation and the representation selected for this response is
   identified by the URI in the Content-Location header.

Then I realised, this is what caused the suggestion of the 
Content-Location approach in the first place.

Takeaways, When you deal with HTTP:

  - resources /sometimes/ have an identifier

  - a representation is /sometimes/ associated with an identified 
resource (one for which you have a URI)

  - a representation /never/ has an identifier.

The Content-Location approach can't work, because the Content-Location 
doesn't identify a representation.

Nathan

Received on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 01:10:41 UTC