RE: Content negotiation: Why always redirect from non-information resource to information resource?

Speaking in non-technical terms:

If a client asks the server: "please give me Berlin", the server must
respond with "sorry, can't give you that", because Berlin is a city that
can't be send through the wire (non-information resource), "but look over
there, maybe that's of help". That's a 303 redirect.

The server is only allowed to respond with an HTTP 200 if it can actually
send what the client wants.

A nice workaround are #-URIs (which I prefer...)

Cheers,
Georgi

--
Georgi Kobilarov
www.georgikobilarov.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-lod-request@w3.org [mailto:public-lod-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Christoph LANGE
> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 12:46 AM
> To: Linked Data community
> Cc: Vyacheslav Zholudev; Florian Rabe
> Subject: Content negotiation: Why always redirect from non-information
> resource to information resource?
> 
> Dear all,
> 
>   in the well-known guides on cool URIs and publishing linked data,
> there is
> one thing I don't understand.  When doing 303 redirects, there are
> always
> three URIs/URLs involved:
> 
> * U, the URI of the non-information resource (redirects depending on
> requested
>   MIME type)
> * U_R, the URL of the RDF information resource
> * U_H, the URL of the HTML information resource
> 
> I do understand that it makes sense to have separate URLs for U_R and
> U_H.
> Delivering everything, be it RDF or HTML, directly from U (which would
> technically be possible) would impair cacheability.
> 
> But why can't we do without U_R and do it like this?
> 
> * If RDF is requested from U, it is directly served from U
> * If HTML is requested from U, a 303 redirect to U_H is made.
> 
> I'd be interested in justifications for the above-mentioned best
> practice
> (with 3 URIs/URLs) that are based on semantic considerations and on
> HTTP
> architecture.  Restrictions imposed by Apache's standard plugins are
> not
> relevant to me.
> 
> Cheers, and thanks in advance,
> 
> Christoph
> 
> --
> Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype
> duke4701

Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 00:01:13 UTC