Re: Creation of Containers

hello henry.

On 2012-11-07 15:27 , "Henry Story" <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>On 8 Nov 2012, at 00:12, "Wilde, Erik" <Erik.Wilde@emc.com> wrote:
>>that's what on the web media types are doing. i know that this is way
>> outside of the scope of this group, but since we're saying REST in the
>> charter, this is what we would be doing in a RESTful design: design a
>> media type that represented the concepts we're building interactions
>> around, and then making the distinction you're pointing out is done by
>> virtue of the media type.
>I think you are trying to put too much in the media types. The Media type
>is just a way to interpret a document - i.e. to extract its semantics.

nope, it's more than that. it defines the set of interconnected resources
a client can traverse, and defines that traversing this set of resources
means. for every link that a client can find, the media type specifies why
a client might want to follow that link, and maybe what a client has to do
when following that link.

> 
>>yup, and that would be the header signaling the media type.
>As said above that would be like saying that servers MUST speak a
>different
>language from the other documents they are serving, which seems arbitrary.

it's the opposite. it's the difference in functionality that's exposed as
media types. if you are an XML database, you accept any XML and just store
it. that's fine. if you also allow people to interact with any kind of
management functionality of the database, what you exchange is still XML,
but its meaningful (let's say some XACML for managing access right) and
thus labeled by a media type that makes that distinction clear. that's
just how HTTP works.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2012 23:58:34 UTC