Re: Is 303 really necessary?

On Nov 4, 2010, at 13:17, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> Dave,
> 
> On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 12:56 -0400, David Wood wrote:
>> Hi all,
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> - Wide-spread mishandling of HTTP content negotiation makes it difficult if not impossible to rely upon.  Until we can get browser vendors and server vendors to handle content negotiation in a reasonable way, reliance on it is not a realistic option.  That means that there needs to be an out-of-band mechanism to disambiguate physical, virtual and conceptual resources on the Web.  303s plus http-range-14 provide enough flexibility to do that; I'm not convinced that overloading 200 does.
>> 
> 
> No mud, yet. ;-)


There's time left ;)


> 
> But curious if you can point to numbers on support for 303s and
> http-range-14? Might have enough flexibility but if not widely
> supported, so what? 


Sure.  Both Persistent URLs (purlz.org, purl.org, purl.fdlp.gov and others) support http-range-14 via 303 responses.   DOIs (doi.org) also depend on 303s.

The issue that seems to be understated in this discussion is whether something should be abandoned on the Web because it is not used by "enough" people.  I claim (to the contrary) that something 'useful' need not be 'popular' to be important.

Regards,
Dave




> 
> Hope you are having a great day!
> 
> Patrick
> 
> -- 
> Patrick Durusau
> patrick@durusau.net
> Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
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> 

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 17:25:21 UTC