Re: patch con-neg, was Re: multiple changes to resources

hello martin.

just commenting based on the last 10 years...

On 2013-09-20 02:04 , Martin P Pain wrote:
> How about defining an HTTP header similar to "Content-Type" and
> "Accept", but which doesn't specify the format that the body is
> represented in, but instead specifies what that format is being used to
> express (e.g. in RDF, the vocabulary/ies in use).

this idea pops up with great regularity, just using different names. the 
last proposal before this one coined "Concept-Type" to go with 
"Content-Type", i think.

web architecture is an implementation of REST, and REST is about 
representations; that's the architectural style the web has been 
engineered around. all that matters are representations, and what they 
mean is not relevant for the hypermedia fabric. i don't think there's 
any easy way to change that, and at least for the previous incarnations 
of that idea, they never went anywhere. my guess is that you run into 
fundamental mismatches in too many places. just adding one or two 
headers might look like a quick fix in the beginning, but then it 
probably starts getting more complicated once you start looking into the 
details.

without trying to stir up the 20th iteration of the "web vs semweb 
perma-debate", i would just recommend to dig into a couple of archives 
and try to find the previous approaches in that direction. it may be 
useful to find out where they went, or why they stopped.

cheers,

dret.

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Received on Friday, 20 September 2013 15:51:24 UTC