Re: Discovery/Affordances

On 10 Jun 2013, at 18:12, "Wilde, Erik" <Erik.Wilde@emc.com> wrote:

> hello henry.
> 
> On 2013-06-10 9:04 , "Henry Story" <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>> I argue strongly against using mediatypes as it is mistaking syntax with
>> semantics. Simply put: the content in bytes sent from the server to the
>> client
>> is known as a representation of the resource ( it has a syntax defined by
>> its mime type ) 
> 
> repeating this over and over does not make it any more correct. if that
> were the case, HTML would not exist as a media type (driving the web
> through its HTML-specific links), and instead we would have text/sgml,
> because that would be all that was needed in order to parse HTML into some
> generic metamodel.


You seem to think that my argument is: 
 (h1) "one should use the more generic mime type when there is no loss of information".  

Then your counterargument is 
 (w1) SGML is a more generic mime type to HTML and there is no loss of information
 (h1) + (w1) implies  the SGML mime type should be used instead of the HTML mime type

Now this depends on 
 (w1) but is it true that
   (qw1) HTML is really a syntactic subset of SGML
   (qw2) there is no loss of information. A good SGML parser would have been able
        to work out exactly what the meaning of the HTML was?

But in any case that is _not_ my argument. My argument is that 
the "Content-Type" header gives you the type of the representation. A representation 
is something you cannot do a GET, PUT, POST etc... on. Whereas an HTTP Resource is 
something you can do that on. A stream of bytes is one thing, a Resource is another 
thing. A resource is different from a representation. These are all basic REST 
principles.

So to try to restrict the type of the resource, by placing information
in the Content-Type which is about the representation, is simply a mistake.
It's the wrong place to put that information.


> 
>> Perhaps we could do the HTTP/RDF community a favor to register the
>> relation
>> http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type to the shorthand "type"
>> so that
>> the above could become
>> Link: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#Container>; rel="type"
> 
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6903#section-6

A good, that does indeed look close enough to the rdf:type relation :-)

> 
> cheers,
> 
> dret.
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Monday, 10 June 2013 16:33:40 UTC