Re: Is 303 really necessary?

On 11/4/10 1:51 PM, Nathan wrote:
> Ian Davis wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
>> night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
>> redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
>> with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
>> the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
>>
>> http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
>
> Ian,
>
> Please, don't.
>
> 303 is a PITA, and it has detrimental affects across the board from 
> network load through to server admin. Likewise #frag URIs have there 
> own set of PITA features (although they are nicer on the network and 
> servers).
>
> However, and very critically (if you can get more critical than 
> critical!), both of these patterns / constraints are here to ensure 
> that  different things have different names, and without that 
> distinction our data is junk.
>
> This goes beyond your and my personal opinions, or those of anybody 
> here, the constraints are there so that in X months time when 
> "multi-corp" trawls the web, analyses it and releases billions of 
> statements saying like { </foo> :hasFormat "x"; sioc:about 
> dbpedia:Whatever } about each doc on the web, that all of those 
> statements are said about documents, and not about you or I, or 
> anything else real, that they are said about the right "thing", the 
> correct name is used.
>
> And this is critically important, to ensure that in X years time when 
> somebody downloads the RDF of 2010 in a big *TB sized archive and 
> considers the graph of RDF triples, in order to make sense of some 
> parts of it for something important, that the data they have isn't 
> just unreasonable junk.
>
> It's not about what we say something is, it's about what others say 
> the thing is, and if you 200 OK the URIs you currently 303, then it 
> will be said that you are a document, as simple as that. Saying you 
> are a document isn't the killer, it's the hundreds of other statements 
> said along side that which make things so ambiguous that the info is 
> useless.
>
> If 303s are killing you then use fragment URIs, if you refuse to use 
> fragments for whatever reason then use something new like tdb:'s, 
> support the data you've published in one pattern, or archive it and 
> remove it from the web.
>
> But, for whatever reasons, we've made our choices, each has pro's and 
> cons, and we have to live with them - different things have different 
> name, and the giant global graph is usable. Please, keep it that way.
>
> Best,
>
> Nathan
>
>

AMEN!

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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